I went off FB for a year or two, only to come back on when the pandemic started. I definitely missed the connections and conversations I had with family and friends across the world while I was gone. If I could have that without feeling like I was contributing to all the shenanigans, I would do it.
For work I created a Mastodon account, and so far it seems very nice. There are lots of cool people posting interesting stuff, and no ads. Unfortunately I'm not interested in the "public-only microblog" experience for my personal life, and fine-graned access control in a federated system is a tricky problem; and my experience with the systems that are attempting to address that issue haven't been very positive.
In any case, one of the core functionalities of most federated software is the ability to migrate your profile somewhere else.
My parents, for example, are much more connected to their relatives overseas. More so than they’re relatives, they’re connected to their relatives’ friend groups. The conversations that take place now when they visit are better. They’re more in touch with more lives.
The ads, the fomo, the general fakeness of it all is awful. But the benefits still outweigh the negatives.
It just doesn't happen.
And 'proposition' is the right word to use, since its really just the promise of social networks that people like. In practice it has not worked as a means of connecting people to each other. Certainly not better than the alternatives it replaced. We should call the experiment a failure.
I'm all for getting rid of social networks, especially general-purpose ones. I don't see it happening though. Most people see them as a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes. If you're younger than 30, you probably don't have an intuitive feeling for what the world is like without them. I guess this is understandable, if sad.