very well put. what you say is true.
if we just want to feel more connected to our friends, all we need is a handful of group chats with various friend and family circles. Signal can do that just fine.
Social media seems to have a different role in our civilisation's tech stack - and it turns out, that role seems to be the spreading of propaganda and disinformation by powerful actors.
Maybe - if we manage to free social media from centralised mega corps (Nostr being our best bet), the TRUE potential of social media can emerge. I don't think it is about "feeling more connected" at all. It seems to be just an efficient crowd sourced mechanism of spreading information far and wide.
We need private chats for "feeling connected".
We need self-hosted blogs for long form thought.
We need forums and reddit-style media for sharing and discussing useful information (ie those long form blogs).
We need social media to share "BREAKING NEWS" and all other noteworthy long form content (ie blog posts or relevant reddit-style discussions).
The problems we need to solve is:
- how do we stop people from self-censoring in reddit-style discussions out of fear of getting downvoted, moderated or even banned if one posts something that goes against the narrative
- how do we stop bad actors from spreading a tsunami of fake news and misinformation on social media
- how do we stop "gathering likes and followers" from being an incentive on social media - that just turns everyone into a narcissist.