Back in my day... there wasn't such a thing as social media. To reach friends, you could put something on a bulletin board, holler, put up a sign - but you might not get anyone to notice. When personal computers and the internet took off, there were message boards and other ways to reach people, but they weren't deigned to create networks of people you could reach with a single click in real time.
We saw sites emerging in the 1990s with Six Degrees and Classmates.com, which were a start, followed by more modern networks like MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter. As they evolved, we had a way to connect with friends and share with others in groups of the same interest.
But there's a dark side to this; in order to make money, they started tweaking their algorithms. These are a set of rules to suggest connections you might be interested in following. Fine, if say you are a quilter, and would like to find groups dealing with quilts. But they can also discern from your posting more personal things, like your beliefs and politics, and make suggestions that may not always be in your best interest. Plus, if you express your opinions in comments, you are at risk of getting bombarded with spammers and trolls. Facebook allows you to adjust these to an extent, but usually not quite enough.
We can end up being in an echo chamber, where all we see is opinions similar to our own, as well as a lot of untrue information. This increases the divisiveness in our society, rather than bringing us together. It's a tricky balance, especially considering it is not in the interests of outfits like Facebook to bring us together, but rather to exploit our baser desires to make money. Some sites (like Twitter/X) do this purposely to create controversy.
New contenders like Bluesky have addresses many of the negative aspects of social media. But the problem is getting users to with to new and better platforms. Once a network reaches a critical mass, it becomes expensive to switch to a new one. Let's hope people will figure out a good balance for social networking and not believe what the companies tell you.