A bit of an off-topic, but the social networking protocol should never be designed for the sake of the protocol itself, or it’ll not enjoy the networking effect. A protocol must offer direct benefits to users, so that they keep participating in the network. This participation is what eventually forms the network of people, a.k.a, society. I always pick BitTorrent as the most successful example of such networking protocol - people just wanted to download stuffs (e.g. movies and pxxxs) but ends up participating in the sharing network.
Personally, I think a possible angle of attack for a new practical social network protocol is data management, as the amount of data people generate, consume, store, and share is enormous these days. More like, manage data conveniently, and share them easily as a side-effect.
> A protocol must offer direct benefits to users, so that they keep participating in the network
As someone who tried to give all of the decentralized social networks a shot... something I realised along the way is that they are never going to fly because they are not giving you dopamine kicks like the big tech giants are. I ended up forgetting to visit Lemmy or Pixelfed or <whatever> because I had 2-3 times when I opened up the app and saw the exact same content, giving me a feeling of "nothing is happening here" and thus, I didn't need to check in.
I mean, even Signal has that Instagram story function but I have never seen a contact use it because no one goes to Signal "just to scroll" or whatever. They go there to send or read a message.
Any social media needs content for people to visit. They need to make people feel like they are missing out if they are not visiting. Otherwise, they're just going to end up as an app on the phone which is never opened.
> I ended up forgetting to visit Lemmy or Pixelfed or <whatever> because I had 2-3 times when I opened up the app and saw the exact same content, giving me a feeling of "nothing is happening here" and thus, I didn't need to check in.
I think this is the point the OP is making though, there's little to no actual benefit if the content doesn't change often. You probably never forget to check HN for example.
An RSS reader linked to this via a browser extension might be a more useful interface for feeds that aren't updated as frequently.
I think a good protocol however is key for adoption. Many a good idea has died an early death because the implementation of it was, too complex, insufficiently robust, or poorly thought out for the future.