hm, it just occured to me that in a fedi client with Atom/RSS support, it'd be possible to effectively follow someone and receive only public posts without them being notified.
@scarlett that reminds me of how I used to use tumblr - I didn't have an account, but I had around 10 tabs open on people's blogs, and every day I'd refresh the page, read all their posts, and then go on with the rest of the day
The difference is this would allow responding to them though.