The correct system would be a social media network that doesn’t aspire to become the one and only web site on which its users spend their spare time. Connecting you to your friends and relatives, providing a blogging platform designed to update the people you know on how things are in your life, these are fairly simple things that many web sites have striven to do over the years. In the Before Times, we updated our status on places like Livejournal, read our friends list, and then, being finished with the social media thing, we would use browser bookmarks or Google or a news reader app to go visit other sites, where we would interact with other groups of people and do other things.
Nobody has built it largely because Facebook has devoted huge amounts of resources to ensuring that none of its rivals are permitted to grow into serious contenders for its crown. Also, absent some kind of regulation, the surveillance capitalism adopted by all social media contenders these days is designed to work best when your network becomes the primary place people spend time on, to the exclusion of all others. So the incentives to build your simple little app where people can socialize into a monstrosity like Facebook are extremely high.
