I think that this "new world" of implicit isolation and all social interactions needing to be mediated by machines (since we are supposed to afraid of each other, for some reason) is having a pretty negative impact on most people. The people I know who use social media typically say that they don't actually talk to any people there but just watch cat videos or use it to stay in the loop about other announcements about real world things.

For me, I was never one for the big social media platforms and even my foray into FetLife was more about a place to write stuff and maybe find inspiration. Even that eventually became pointless as all the content either became about angry politics, trendy tribalism, or just spam.

At least with Cacophony, I have somewhere where I can scream into the void without dealing with the fake personas trying to sell something.

As for the other items, keeping questions like those in mind can be useful but I think that the honest problem is that most people don't know what they truly want or how they could possibly go about getting to that point. I suspect that this is a kind of learned helplessness or general dispassionate alienation. I know that I don't have a good sense of what could improve things given that I am satisfied with little but want to feel useful and free, 2 things we aren't allowed to feel anymore.

That pending move should be interesting, though.