One day you couldn't sleep and you were looking at your phone at 3am when a notification popped up saying your friend-status-thing app was synchronizing. You got curious and tapped on the thing and watched it.
It told you that some of your friends had nominated you as one of their trusted text backups, and your phone was now checking all their posts and downloading any it'd missed, so if their phone got stolen by a crow or buried under a tree then they could come round your house with their new phone and get their old posts back. You remember seeing the option when you first installed the app, and you didn't bother with it, but in that moment you felt weirdly grown-up and reliable, and you told yourself to try and remember to sort out backups tomorrow.
You watched it looking at each post in turn and getting the comments and reactions and stuff, and you imagined some scruffy little librarian raccoon nodding and scribbling notes and putting them in lots of different drawers, making sure that nobody lost anything. This somehow made you feel safe.
You were glad it decided to do all this when you were asleep, because your phone got kinda warm.
One of your friends uses an app called Yesterday or something, except spelled wrong, Yes!Today! or some crap like that, it does the daily Go Get Everything thing too, except that's it, it never updates in real time, it only ever shows you what your friends did yesterday. Every night he puts on his glasses and makes a drink and gets in his comfy chair and makes a ritual of it, like people used to do with the newspaper. He has one of those e-ink phones that doesn't even scroll, just flips from page to page like a book.
You might try it one day, or you might not, it sounds equal parts cosy and infuriating. But it takes all sorts, doesn't it? That's kind of the point, right?
You've got the wall up, you've got your lunch and there's nothing good on the telly and you're too dusty to play a videogame one-handed so you figure alright more scrolling while I eat this nice baked potato, and look at that, you're out of friend stuff.
So you hit the button for Friends Of Friends. Now this is dangerous, because it sucks you in, but this shows you posts from people who you're not friends with, but you have friends in common. Sometimes you'll make a new friend here, and other times you remember why these people are at arm's length.
Some folk hit the third button, friends of friends of friends. You're glad you have to hit the button, you have to make that decision, because it's usually nicer to read a book or play a game. If you hit it enough times your phone gets warm. If you see Kevin Bacon you've gone too far.
There's also Links. Sometimes folk find an article on the web and copy the link to it on their own phone feeds. This is separated out for a reason, this app is supposed to be about what your friends are doing, not what your friends are looking at on the internet. There's another different app for that, because it really is a different thing, but some folk just want to use One App so it's here as well, whatever. You don't look at that section much but it's fun sometimes. Like multiplayer web surfing.
Sometimes you don't want to talk to your friends. Sometimes you just want to be with them. Like, hang out and watch things together, parallel play, sometimes not even that! Sometimes you just want to know what they're up to. Sometimes not even that, you just want to know that they're... y'know, there.
Ambient updates. You saw the forecast for the bitter cold, but a friend posted that they're eating some stew, so you don't have to worry about that friend. Mundane taskposting, someone putting their to-do list online and letting folk know when they've run the vacuum and had a shower.
The boring updates are good. News that you don't care about, from people you do care about.
The old social media apps spent most of their time telling you about all the danger in the world. It's useful to know of the danger of course, but it was never a good idea to do that in the same place you go when you want reassurance that your friends are safe.
It took far, far too long before someone thought to make an app whose sole purpose was to give you evidence, upon demand, that your friends are safe.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops