Personalised is too vague of a term. IMO what destroyed social media was ending the chronological friends feed. When social media stopped being photos from your friends and family and started becoming endless content creator posts and ragebait.

Social media should not show any posts from people you haven’t friended.

You could make social media based on anonymous queries without personalization or likes. It wouldn't be useless, it would just be unrecognizable as social media.

The old social media was at its simplest a chronological feed from the friends, you wanted to see.

If I want to add personalization I could add a algorithm to do that, only so that it promotes my wellbeing.

It really shouldn't be this difficult.

Yeah, tbh I want more personalization in that I want posts from my friends, not clickbait the algorithm has decided I'm interested in because people who engage with this also engage with that...

Instagram (at least in europe) already provides this feature as they have to. Problem is you need to specifically adjust your feed every time you open the app, which makes it kind of useless against the addictive nature of it.

Neutral social backend/API and a local client with the algorithm I've customized.

Or something like that.

> these apps are virtually useless without personalization

Social media was popular before the algorithmically tuned endless scroll.

But not profitable. Not at the levels to justify the share price.

Personally I would prioritize banning things like smoking, alcohol and meat.

But then again, it’s kinda a free world. You can’t just ban everything. I think an age ban is a good middle road.

Banning smoking in public areas is great, though there is (slight) nuance in how bad smoking is depending on ingredients used. Some organic red wine every now and then depending on the individual can be totally fine and possibly beneficial. People binge drinking is terrible for culture.

But banning meat? That is just completely ridiculous. I would 100% agree that factory farming has to stop, as it's damaging to our environment, our animal friends, and ourselves even. But the reality is that (nearly all) humans need meat to thrive. No need to eat it every single day, but definitely a good idea to eat tons of it in general (including fish). This can and should be done in a more sustainable way: regenerative farming.

And just to point it out: vegetable farming is not a holy grail that could even solve this problem. Many would become weak, ill and possibly unfertile.

an age ban for meat would be interesting.. :-) all the rest have them so why not social media which clearly does harm to minors.

Facebook became huge because it was essentially a static feed with a good friend-finding algorithm.