No, I don't consider hacker-news to be social media, rather a news aggregator with a message board. Although, I would frequent here less probably if I was on other social media.
I've never really used Twitter, and I don't browse YouTube, or bother looking at comments.
I had stopped reading my feed, a couple of years ago. It was just old white people, screaming at each other.
> set my YouTube to stop suggesting to me via algorithm
This suggests a less-than-total commitment to backing out. I would consider "no social" to mean not even visiting the site, or running the app.
In my case, this is about the only place I engage in anything like social media. I would have to stop reading HN to be "no social," and I'm not interested in doing that.
I really thought they were on to something with the "make it a protocol" thing. Now I see that no social media will satisfy me. I don't WANT a platform where "everyone can say anything (so long as its legal and you don't say anything bad about fascists so the fascist government will leave us alone)". I WANT a platform where productive people show what they produced and discuss it along with the things other people produce. Even if that product is "jokes" or "writing". I just want a marketplace of ideas that have some grounding in practical reality. Not a hyper-void filled with nonsense thoughts and ideologies that can withstand rounds and bouts of academic scrutiny but would wither instantly in any practical application.
I don't want a place of arguments and gossip and attention. I want a place of content and challenge and speculation and application. I don't want social media, even for what it purports to offer. I don't want to "be in a room with everyone in the world". I want to "be in a room with people who are doing wild an interesting things and want to do so in a community of others like them."
I don't want the unwashed masses. I want self-selection and communities.
tl;dr: I want forums that work like feeds. Small groups of like-minded people engaging with one another. I just want it to WORK like social networks, with following, and topical follows (hashtags), and content feeds.
I am working on Mikoto Platforms, which is basically designed to be somewhere between Discord and Notion, but open source + decentralized. There is no global feed; in fact, some users thought it was a bug that it took you to such an empty screen when you first started it. Platforms are what you make of it.
I mean, the whole app is pretty impressive. It's clear, from the blog posts, that we're of like minds when it comes to the "good parts" of the internet and what makes the "bad" parts so frustrating. If I used Discord more this might mean more, but I'm pretty satisfied to swap out my Discord usage for Mikoto platforms. Seems like a win to me, at least.
All that said, I am still left a bit unsatisfied as far as a social media replacement. A "chat" presentation eschews the kind of "press release" posts that social media accommodates well for creatives. At the very least, I wouldn't feel "normal" posting announcements that didn't necessarily expect follow up engagement in a chat-style environment. Posting "here's this new thing I did" on a social media feed without any follow up is...lonely, but not particularly uncommon. But posting the same thing to an empty or unresponsive chat room is...somehow sadder? To me at least.
I have user scripts on both my iPhone and my computer that completely disable the Instagram recommended feed. I have disabled YouTube thumbnails and the YouTube sidebar. /r/popular or other popular subreddits get automatically redirected to my Reddit homepage which has a lot less garbage on it. I have completely disabled my Twitter feed. I even have certain domains removed on HackerNews and made an extension to only update a few times a day. And a ton more.
If you're a developer and you want to stop doomscrolling... you have the power.