In case you've come in from the greater whole of the internet (how, I don't know, considering my site is supposed to be invisible to all search engines but Marginalia), my webhost, Neocities, also has a microblogging platform for registered users. Even though most of the people who come to Neocities to escape from the algorithm-driven, procedurally-generated, corporate-clean experience provided by name-brand social media platforms, some people have accused Neocities of being "just another social network".
Let's talk about the built-in microblog. When a registered user logs into Neocities, their first view of the service is a news feed with site updates and microblog posts. Perhaps in an artistic choice by the developer, microblog posts have a maximum character limit of 420 characters. So, while longer than your average tweet, it's still short enough to encourage brevity. Also, while social media allows you to make a theoretically unlimited number of posts, Neocities only allows you to make 10 posts per day, discouraging the use of the Neocities microblog as a status updater. Well, that's the official maximum. In reality, I've been limited after as many as 14 or as few as 1. In any case, this encourages many users to either maintain an active social media presence elsewhere, or to code a microblog into their own site, like I do.
Nonetheless, while there are a lot of people who don't view Neocities as a social network, there are also a lot who do. A couple mutual followers of mine have opined that Neocities is just another site where people can obsess over their follower count, unconditionally follow-for-follow people to raise that number, and look good for the Neocities showcase algorithm. I won't disagree with that assessment. I do think there are people who are using Neocities as a replacement social network, insofar as they have migrated their aspirations for being at the top of the heap away from Twitter and onto Neocities. Indeed, this host's Website showcase operates on an algorithm of its own, called "Special Sauce". Without going into the technical bits of it too much, "Special Sauce" operates on the principle of, essentially, constant engagement, both of the community and of the webmaster. It is not enough to simply have 500 followers and 3.5 million views to get to the top of the showcase; one must also regularly update one's own site and engage with the community. Traditional social media doesn't care about how much a user engages with the community.
Also, traditional social media doesn't care how a user interacts with its service, to the point most influencers won't even make their own content. Either they're old-school and they pay others to make their content for them, or they use generative AI. While it's not inconceivable that a few Neocities sites are AI-generated, the first 100 sites on the showcase are not. Maybe the webmaster was feeling a bit lazy and couldn't be arsed to learn how to make something work in CSS and just asked ChatGPT to do it for them, but in the large part, all of these sites were made by hand. (Also, don't mistake my understanding for acceptance. AI sucks, and, if you disagree then you suck, too.)
That's ultimately what separates Neocities from a traditional corporate social network. On those sites, users are separated into 2 categories: facilitators and consumers. Facilitators are expected to constantly churn out content of any level of quality so the host can make so much money on ad revenue; while consumers are expected to, well, consume. On corporate social networking, it's either advertise or be advertised to. While there's nothing preventing a Neocities user adding a Google Ads bar to their site or asking visitors to consider becoming a member of their Patreon, you are not pressured to use your site as a side-hustle. Nor is Neocities using your site for monetary gain on its own part. A Neocities-hosted site is not simply an agglomeration of soulless content or a thinly-veilled advertising platform. Most of the people who establish sites here have either never written HTML before and are keen to pick up a new skill, or are webdev old-timers who have become fatigued of plugin-based development with a side-order of generative AI and want to stretch their atrophying coding muscles.
The problem is how the term "social network" has been corrupted into meaning "deep corporate advertising scheme". If you examine the term on its own merits, a social network is a web of connections to other people to facilitate conversation. By this definition, yes, Neocities is a social network. Despite how little action against AI scrapers the Neocities maintainers are willing to take, Neocities is not a deep corporate advertising scheme. In any case, the news feed is entirely optional. If it feels too much like Twitter, then you can turn that feature completely off. Personally, I use it to see what people are doing on their sites, how they're improving their code, what they've written in their blogs, and what games they're playing lately. I view the Like button as a nonverbal signal of encouragement, to let people know I appreciate their efforts and that I enjoy seeing them on my feed. Since I often can't find the words to express what I like about people's updates (my particular flavour of autism makes it hard for me to explain things sometimes), I let the Like button say it for me. I've also made 4 of my best online friends ever (and 1 of the best friends in general I've had in years) over the Neocities microblog. Of course, I imagine the same thing can be said of a traditional corporate social media dashboard. I'll let you be the judge of how much like social media Neocities is.