Basically, Facebook is a discussion system. The privacy options make it complicated, but a replacement that was all-public is all I would need. Everything I post there is public. Most attempts to compete have focused on privacy options, imho incorrectly.
I thought that's pretty much what Medium was attempting to do now. A public discussion system, minus all the privacy options. No?
Yes! I think that's where they're headed as well. It's like a gravity well sucking all social networks into it. You know if we had a common identity and storage system they would all interop too. (Actually they would more than interop, they would be different user interfaces on the same data structure.)
Google Plus Collections is another public discussion system. Readable incognito without signing in. Comments or +1/liking requires signing in. This is one of my G+ collections of posts: it is on Public Transportation.
PS: I actually was expecting your reply system to work like many message system that auto link a bare URL. I saw that it didn't do that and assume your reply system didn't support links. Only discovered the linking feature when I read a subsequent post of yours. Highlighting text pops up menubar with a lot more editing features. Mmm ... I wonder how long I would have gone without noticing that feature here. Hah.
PS2: Wah, I managed to overwrite my original reply. I clicked on this reply. Then I decided to reply to your reply. I clicked on the drop-down menu of your reply, chose Reply. It open up a new edit box. I put some text there. It came out up here. Wah.
PS3: Trying to find a way to recover my previous reply text, that was here. Can't seem to find an easy way to do that. Ended up retyping (main reply text and PS) from memory and a partial screenshot.
I know! I've been trying to figure out what kind of clues I should leave for people to say "there's a wizzy editor in here, you should use it."
Finally replying to your reply.
Two ways can work for me ...
(1) An entry in the Reply's pop-dowm menu called "Format..." or similar
(2) When you first open the reply edit box, it might show a grey descriptive background text saying something like "Enter text here. Highlight text to format it."