As other people have mentioned but I think not quite nailed perfectly, restrictions on behavior aren't quite the right solution to the problems that plague social media. Some people think that the right move is to eliminate engagement optimization algorithms, and I think that's not quite exactly right either.

IMO the right solution is personal executive autonomy over content presentation and algorithmic optimization. By which I mean, I want to be able to make an "executive" choice over what kind of experience I want to have on a social platform. By "executive" I mean, I want to be able to make that choice explicitly, not implicitly by my behavior. For instance, an implicit choice is walking by a beautiful chocolate cake and being unable to resist eating it. An explicit choice is being able to architect my environment in advance, such that there are no beautiful chocolate cakes to tempt me.

The biggest problem with social media right now is that the incentives of the existing platforms do not allow people to make these choices explicitly. They do not allow us to craft our information environment using our higher order executive functions, they force us to do it using our reptillian brains, one moment at a time. Essentially, they force us to choose: either you get none of what social media has to offer, or you take every aspect of it, whether you like it or not.

Being able to explicitly say "for the next hour I want to be fed thirst traps and rage bait, but then I want that turned off" would be an amazing feature. People have a right to that kind of content if they want it. But they equally have a right to engage their higher cognitive functions and choose not to be expose to it if they don't want it, or choose to be able to architect the manner in which they are exposed to it.

It's called RSS. and a feed reader.

I swear, people are too busy re-inventing the wheel when it already exists. use one of the literal hundreds of free services to write what you want and syndicate it. and use the same system to ingest exactly what you want.

We hit the nail on the head 2 decades ago. It's been rusting since.

That works for the consumption side, but at least from what I've seen (it's been a while), the feed readers don't have so much share/comment/like side to them. Frankly, they seem to miss the social side. Again, maybe I'm just not using the right feed readers, but when I use some these days, they feel somewhat isolated, just receiving info, not also sending it.

Many sites including HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/rss) provide RSS feeds, so you could presumably navigate to the relevant page for the share/comment/like functionality. I realize that's not ideal but it seems well within reason to me.

Software exists to translate RSS feeds to ActivityPub actors (ex https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub). Going the other direction, Pleroma provides RSS feeds. Not sure about Mastodon or Misskey.

Oh yeah, I could. I guess I'm just believing more and more in the power of a familiar interface. I feel somewhat comfortable hopping around different sites and creating all sorts of accounts (on my computer, less so on my phone), yet I imagine many really don't want that hassle. If the comment box were the same everywhere, that could help, but still, I find sometimes if it takes that extra effort, I often won't do it.

> Software exists to translate RSS feeds to ActivityPub actors (ex https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub). Going the other direction, Pleroma provides RSS feeds.

I may check it out for some of my sites, thank you.