It's Nothing Personal...

Is there such a thing as personally wholesome social media?
What's the limit to how many relationships you can or should reasonably try to sustain?
Maybe if you need software to keep up to date and to keep folks updated then you've already hit that limit?

It's already clear that there's business value in being able to get a message in front of a bunch of people; but is there actual personal value in contributing to and trying to drink from a crowdsourced feed of unfiltered content at a volume and pace that would be near impossible to recreate via analog means?

I heard a comedic yet compelling summary of the nature of activity and relationships on different social media platforms and it chimed with the larger question of whether any of it is valuable beyond each platform's initial novelty of format.
There's a bit in the standup monologue along the lines of how you initially you had platforms (i.e. Facebook) for keeping up with people you knew in real life. Then came platforms (i.e. Instagram) where you built parasocial connections with people that you would rarely, if ever, meet, but you felt like you were familiar with through essentially 1-way consumption of their feed. Then the likes of Tiktok & Twitter thrived on facilitating parasocial interactions between total strangers spontaneously huddled around a particular vibe, topic or conversation.

I think that's a useful framing to at least provoke a reflection on what specific value you gain from each platform so that you can dip in with a specific intention, before getting out before getting caught up in the dark UX patterns designed to keep you engaged for as long as possible regardless of whether you're getting value out of it.

In contrast, I had an initial recoil from Facebook a few years back for less lofty intellectural reasons. I just felt overwhelmed by the burden of attempting to politely sustain too many "friendships".
My Facebook social graph by my early twenties was pretty large thanks to multiple disparate community clusters related to the numerous & varied activities and locations that I was active in.
I have multiple cultural identities as a 1st generation immigrant to the UK; I had multiple part time jobs, including a job that took me all over the county working at different council-owned leisure centres. On top of that I had the privilege of attending a huge world-renowned university in the nations capital, where I was again also working part time alongside a bunch of extracurricular clubs and societies.
Basically, by virtue of being approachable and overly polite - "yeah! Add me on Facebook, and maybe we can hang out again sometime..." - my tertiary layer of acquaintances was in the thousands.
The sense of obligation was getting overwhelming. Feeling bad for missing birthday greetings, turning down invites to events, forgetting to reply to messages, and trying to keep folks in the loop with important life updates etc. It was getting silly so I exported all my data and cut it out of my life.

I thought I would have more regrets about it, and that seeing folks again in real life would be awkward or uncomfortable. I was gloriously wrong. Facebook was getting a bit out of fashion with my peer group by then anyway, replaced by Instagram and the ubiquity of Whatsapp groups. It wasn't long before I ended up retreating from similar pressures on those platforms too. However, by then it was also motivated by a growing distrust of Meta's respect for privacy along with their rapidly diminishing competitive advantage in terms of technical features.

Returning to the initial questions, I've grown to accept and even rejoice in how you can focus your energy on your nearest and dearest immediate social circle. Lapsing out of touch with folks that aren't as physically or emotionally connected to your day to day is fine! The key lesson for me was that it's not mutually exclusive with picking back up where you left off when the opportunities to reconnect in-person arise naturally. The more I've settled into that, the more I've realised many other folks are aspiring to make a similar adjustment to their (para)social media diet.