Social media has a lot of problems: it's (mostly) centralized, it requires Yet
Another Internet Account, it's mostly spam, it's mostly garbage, it primarily
exists to shove advertising in your face, etc. However, there already exists
another technology that can be abused to make a kind of basic social network:
RSS (you could also use Atom if you wanted, but I'm going to talk about RSS here
because I didn't want to type RSS/Atom every time).

If you don't know what RSS is, you probably want to figure that out before you
read any further. I'll briefly touch on it here since you probably won't do
that.

RSS is an easy way to syndicate content on the Internet. For a lot of people,
it's even automatic when they set up whatever content management system they
decide to use. But it's also not too tough to create and update one manually. 

A typical use case for RSS is that a site operator will post an update of some
kind, and then the RSS feed will contain either the entire item, or it will
contain a snippet of the item, with the goal of enticing the reader to the site
to finish reading the thing (with the end-goal usually being to generate
ad-revenue). However, RSS feeds can contain just about any information we want
(up to some poorly-defined limits), and that's something we can (ab)use to solve
several of the problems that social media in its current form provides us with.

A non-exhaustive list of problems that social media gives us and some solutions: 

Problem: Social media posts have to be a certain, restrictive length. This is
mostly a twitter and mastodon problem.

Solution: RSS items can be essentially any length you want. Although some
readers apparently have issues with huge RSS files, if you're writing that much,
you should probably just put it on your website as a proper entry.

Problem: Social media posts restrict what kind of media you can post.

Solution: RSS feeds allow you to post essentially any kind of media you want,
including images and audio. If you wanted to post video, it would probably be a
good idea to provide a link to that instead, but you can also post unobfuscated
links pointing wherever you want (or obfuscate them if you want to do that,
too).

Problem: Social media networks are owned by a central authority (although some
are decentralized it's a royal pain to set up your own instance, or if you use
someone else's instance, you have to trust that that instance will be there
tomorrow and the it won't get shut off because one of the users compared the
admin's parentage to livestock).

Solution: You can create an RSS feed any time you want, you don't need anyone's
permission, unless you want to host it on their server, and you can have a feed
up in a few minutes. A few more minutes if you wanted to buy a domain to host it
on.

Problem: It's sometimes difficult or impossible to delete your social media
account.

Solution: If you want to drop of out sharing status updates, you can just delete
your feed.

There are also some benefits that don't really solve a problem, exactly, but are
nice side effects of abusing the technology in this way.

Benefit: You can use any RSS reader that you want. Pick your favorite reader and
add feeds for all of your friends/people you want to follow. There are no APIs
you have to learn that change every six months or disappear without warning. 

Benefit: It's more difficult for content to 'go viral'. Yes, it's still possible
that everyone you follow could post the same cat video or gif of someone falling
down, but it's much harder to copy the link, create a new entry with said link,
and then publish it rather than just hitting the retweet or share button. Stuff
went viral since before the internet was a thing and adding a small impediment
won't stop that. 

Benefit: Your mom won't use it. Okay, when I say 'your mom', I don't mean *your
mom*. Your mom is a wonderful, smart, amazing, et cetera person who knows more
about computers and technology than a golem made out of Elon Musk clones. I'm
talking about someone else's mom or dad or brother or sister or
<insert_familial_relation_here> who can't tell a computer from an old Speak 'n'
Spell that someone carved Windows logo into. You're probably already
picturing him/her/them. 

Creating an RSS feed and making it available isn't very hard for me, and
probably not for you, but for a certain segment of the population (i.e. 'users')
it might as well be black magic. It's going to require learning a tiny bit of
XML, crafting a file, putting that file somewhere that the Internet can get to
it, and then updating it once in a while. That kind of effort is only going to
be done by a very few people, which has the potential to keep the signal to
noise ratio high, but also will mean that updates are less frequent (which is
also not really a bad thing). 

There are also some drawbacks that I think are acceptable tradeoffs for all of
the benefits that you get. 

Drawback: There's no easy way to have conversations. I'm sure that this could be
done, but there's no real good way to have public conversations over RSS. You
could put an email address in your content and invite comments over email, which
could then be made public, or not. Or you could just use something designed to
facilitate conversations like IRC or a BBS.

Drawback: It's difficult to discover new feeds to follow. You essentially have
to stumble across one or have someone tell you what theirs is.

Drawback: You can't have your entire history of posts going back to the
beginning of time. Once RSS feeds get over a certain size, some readers barf,
so it's probably a good idea to keep your number of posts to a reasonable
amount, maybe a dozen or two. You can archive your old posts in a text file or
an html document if you really want to save them for some reason. 

Drawback: It's hard to fire off a quick message. Even if you're programmatically
genarating your feed, it takes a little extra time to make a new update as
compared to firing off a tweet or whatever. I'm not sure that's really a
drawback, though. Since it takes a little bit more effort, and therefore time,
it's more likely that the post will be well-crafted, well thought-out, and
well-reasoned (oh, who am I kidding? If someone is sufficiently motivated to
post garbage, they're going to post garbage no matter how long it takes them or
how difficult it is). 

Drawback: There's no authentication. You can't really ever know if the person
updating the feed is who they say they are. But if that's something that bothers
you, then the Internet might not be for you.

Drawback: You can still be tracked. If someone was so inclined, they could put a
tracking pixel or tracking code in their feed. If someone wants to do that,
nobody could really stop them, but they could easily be excised from my
newsreader. Or I could use a feed reader that doesn't support images or
javascript.

Last updated 8 Feb 2018