The thing about half-joking about things is that they sometimes become real. I said something about how the only alternative social network I’d trust now is a system where everyone runs their own secret RSS feeds (with no corresponding web component) and passes them around by word-of-mouth. No discovery, no stars, no pageviews, just semi-public paragraphs.
A range of options, depending on how much you want to do yourself:
- Use an existing publishing service – preferably something old and boring – that generates its own RSS feeds. Make the web component private. Pass your RSS feed around. Something like Tumblr or Livejournal would work well.
- Generate your RSS feed with a program on your own computer and put it up somewhere. A static site generator like Jekyll can turn a series of Markdown files into a RSS feed pretty easily, once you set up the template. You can put the generated RSS file into your Dropbox Public Folder and share that link around.
- Put something like Kirby or Stacey on a PHP server, which will dynamically generate the RSS for you. (If you don’t have any web layouts, it won’t have corresponding web pages.)