Blogs, personal websites, forums, email, and IM all still exist and are still large platforms.
It’s clear based on user behavior that users like the experience that centralized, for-profit social media networks provide. That experience invariably is very expensive to deliver… Dramatically more expensive than serving Wikipedia, for example, and the costs grow faster as the number of users increase.
So, in order to deliver the user experience that real people have demonstrated their preference for, one of the key inputs is exceptionally large (and increasing) amounts of money.
In order to be sustainable, that money has to come from somewhere. Targeted ads aren’t the only option, but no viable competitor has been discovered.
The reason why targeted ads are so productive here is because the value of the network grows non-linearly (up to a point) with each additional user. If you charge an entrance fee to each user, your network will be smaller and therefore outrageously less valuable than any network that does not charge an entrance fee.
Therefore, so long as any social network is willing to make their network free to enter, effectively no network with a comparable service can charge for usage.
Importantly, not only will the free social network be more valuable than the paid social network in relative terms, it will also be more valuable in absolute terms – both in terms of value received per user and number of users receiving value. So, it may be possible to regulate free social networks out of existence, but doing so would necessarily destroy a lot of user value in the process.
Perhaps there is some type of patronage or donation-based model that could both enable the free entry price and avoid the pitfalls of the ads-based business model. However, an organization like this is unlikely to attract the technical talent necessary to build competitive products.
Of course, like both of us mentioned, other models and competitive ecosystems exist. Centralized social networks have not killed email or instant messaging or blogs or websites. Those things are, by every measure, actually way bigger than they ever have been. So in a sense, the thing you’re hoping for is already here, it’s just not the dominant modality chosen by other people.
There are fair questions to ask about the power that ownership and control of a centralized social network imbues. Though, I think those are orthogonal concerns to the question of funding mechanisms.
In sum, I think the world you’ve expressed desire for does, indeed, already exist. It happens to co-exist with the world that you have expressed distaste for. While I am empathetic to your distaste for social media’s influence and business model, I think it’s important to recognize both why it exists and the ways in which it’s existence is not strictly zero sum.