Whilst I don’t think we could ban it if we wanted to, I do think that a focus less on either commercialising social media or commercial social media in general with their algorithms etc would be better for people’s mental health.

That is not to say that non commercial social is better inherently, it is all about the attitude people come to it with, getting away from the virality, fame and poorly thought out opinions and misinformation, working on bigotries and self esteem and developing community and genuine friendship with a diverse array of people would create a better social media and world in general.

Sadly not even the fediverse is at all close to that yet, perhaps it will be one day, but there are still so many folks with ideas around what social media should be for that they haven’t dropped their ideas that make it untenable and unbearable, they also haven’t let go of a lot of their bigotries and don’t listen when told otherwise, that and even with the best of intentions it can still create low self-esteem with edited media or people only showing you their ‘best’ sides, even without algorithms.

Social media should be about improving the world and ourselves, but it has a long way to go to create that mindset and to reward it, even the fediverse.