What is social media?
I could look up a definition, but my gut tells me that social media is something that allows users to interact in a few particular ways. Users create content 'updates' in some form. Other users can subscribe to these updates via a 'feed' of some kind. They then can aggregate these 'feeds' into a 'main feed' that shows updates from everyone they're following. Users can interact with the items in the feed in a variety of ways: they can reply to it, they can put a copy of it into their own feed, they can 'like' it, etc.
Whenever I use social media, almost every way you can interact with an item on social media feeds the part of my brain that makes me want to use it more. Posting something feels good. Having someone 'like' a post feels good. Getting new followers feels good. And it's really easy to optimize behavior on the platform so that you get as many of those 'feels good' moments as you can. I find myself doing this more and more, and I don't really like it.
I don't like it because for me, that means that I'm constantly checking for things to reply to, and every response I craft is couched in me wondering how I can get the maximum engagement from it.
(Sidenote: after spending a lot more time on the Fediverse side of social media, I noticed an uptick in posts where people will make a statement or present a problem and then will get upset that they got responses. Saying things like, "I wasn't looking for suggestions", which tells me that they don't want social media. They want one-way communication where they can just say stuff to their fans.)
But what if we eliminate some of these things? What if we keep the ability to follow people, but eliminate follower count? What if we eliminate the ability to directly reply to status updates? What if we remove status interactions like 'like' or re(tweet|post|blog)? What would we have left?
My first thought was that I was describing a .plan file. I briefly considered installing fingerd and hosting my own .plan file, but I didn't want the administrative burden of managing something like that, especially since effectively nobody would even be able to access it anyway.
My second though was .rss files. Newsreaders are a lot more ubiquitous than the finger command, and they can be hosted on a web server that I already have. You can follow it if you want to with the reader you already have, you can put arbitrary HTML in the updates, and it doesn't support comments.
The only problem with that is that creating and updating an rss feed can be time consuming if you do it by hand (I know it is, because I tyically update this site's rss by hand, which is why it's frequently got errors). So I wrote a short script to update the rss feed for me.
This is still experimental, so I don't know how much I'm going to use it, especially since I can update my website any time I want.