BuddyPress.org

I can’t really comment on pods sorry but if you want to customise your status updates you can using CSS fairly easily – depends on what you want to do though. Are you looking to style their look in the theme or style them when posting the update?

Read this topic if you want to add more fields to the status update. https://buddypress.org/community/groups/creating-extending/forum/topic/adding-a-second-element-for-posting-with-an-activity/?topic_page=1&num=15

But I think a better approach is to create a component.

A component will create a directory much like members or activity. url.com/recipes

On a users page it will have a tab recipes that list a users added content. The activity stream in my opinion should not be edited. It’s a listing of all site activity not individual content. That should be added via a component.

The BuddyPress skeleton component is an example plugin to learn the complexity of creating what you desire