I don’t buy it. We’re probably past peak social media at this point. And the outer reality will always have a higher status than any of the inner ones.
Kind of, depending on the platform, if you squint your eyes at it?
I suppose it doesn't matter what it's actually called. I call it community in general.
Communities in this sense are the middle ground between your direct personal network (which is also the deepest form of relation), and social media as the widest (the shallowest form of relation) form of reach.
Offline, people have always tended to come together around common interests and values. My wife and I, for example, are part time performing magicians and we're a member of a local magic group that meets IRL.
Prior to what we have come to call "social media", existed forums. Forums were this wonderful utopian paradise of yesteryear where people engaged in long form discussions, often heated but mostly civil, about special interests that they cared about.
The term "social media" didn't start to catch on until the news feed was a thing. That was the "contribution" of both Facebook and Twatter and it was a big PART of what changed everything.
The other factor was the so-called "mobile revolution."
Forums are great when you're at a keyboard. They start to lose their appeal when you are engaging using a small touch screen.
What you are describing sounds like people returning to the state of the world as it existed before social media. Where people come together around common interests and values instead of using the news feed where you get fire-hozed with random shit that "the algorithm" thinks might trigger you into engaging with it.
Except now it's all on Facebook and it's incredibly hard to leave Facebook, because all communications with any type of group happens on Facebook. I have friends who can't leave Facebook, because their kids soccer team holds them hostage. Leave Facebook and we'll kill your child's social life. I can't even join the parents group for my child's school, almost no one else will do it, because it takes time, so they are lacking parents, but it is coordinated on Facebook.
I used to organise playtime for toddlers once a week, no one else wanted to do, but the kids loved it. Everyone was used to everything being organised via Facebook, where I don't have an account. So the communication was done by someone else in the umbrella organisation for all local sports, gymnastics, e-sport etc. More than once I showed up to get everything ready only to learn that the space was booked for something else that day, being cleaned or renovated. Everyone else had been informed, expect me, the guy who was suppose to be in charge of the damn thing, because the organisation had no real website or mailing list to speak of and just expected everyone to be on Facebook.
Everything is on f-ing Facebook, Sports, clubs, hobbies, reselling, announcements of everything local, and only on Facebook. The only exception is professional meetups, which Linkedin will happily inform you about two weeks after the meetup, stupid, brain dead, algorithmically power "news" feed.
I want mailing-lists and Usenet, but everyone else want a mobile app and apparently Facebook.
My only counter-argument, and it's not even a counter-argument really, is that this is a fact of life that exists with or without Facebook.
My personal pet peeve is that I don't want to own a mobile phone at all. Not even a dumb phone and not even a landline. If I find myself in an emergency without the ability to dial 911 that's a risk I'm willing to take on a personal level. I just don't want a phone because I find the idea of a noise making device that can interrupt me at unexpected times to be a crime against humanity. But more and more essential services like banking are assuming that people have smart phones. My bank would deny services to me if I didn't even have a landline, since they require a phone number tied to their account records. My work assumes that people not only have their own smart phone but are willing to install authenticator apps for MFA etc. And my workplace is not alone.
If it's not Facebook that "everyone" is using that leaves minority opinions wishing for an alternative, it's something else.
But when a Presidential candidate (who will pick up roughly half the popular vote) is openly spreading social media misinformation, and the owner of Twitter is offering million dollar lotteries to influence the vote, it's fair to say enough people "buy it".