To my eye, social media now dispense a sense of inadequacy, the better to sell palliatives. What we have is nothing so benign as a pleasure machine, and frequently becomes a hate vortex. Happy people, after all, might not need all the crap the commercial Internet’s real customer base is pushing.
The Social Media as Misery Machine – by Nick Harkaway

Perhaps the Fediverse, that Mastodon is part of, is the way forward.