You don't need to build a new network - one called the Fediverse (mostly made up of Mastodon and Pleroma and powered by the W3C standard ActivityPub) already exists and lots of cool people are on there. It is however sorely lacking a way to give silent Bobs more attention - who posts more just gets more attention. Luckily it doesn't have a business model that would prevent one from building something cool on top of it.

I think it'd be pretty cool to have a curation algorithm that the user can control.