Several years ago, I deleted all social media. The hardest for me was to get rid of was Snapchat, which I most recently got off at the very beginning of this year, because I always found it to be the least invasive of all the modern social medias. Still, like all of them, it's became what is effectively a TikTok clone and home to brainrot. I've always been introverted, so social media was a scapegoat for me to interact with people in an unnatural but comfortable way. The problem is while I deleted social media to try and force myself into more social situations in an effort to self-improve, it's actually led to less interactions outside of the usual. This is because social media has become so engrained in the current (and what's left of the past) generations that without it, you're out of options to take relationships of any kind further. Perhaps it's a localized problem but I see other people sharing similar experiences when they've removed themselves from social media.
Let me use an example with something that isn't really a social media but has a similar "peer pressure" problem. Recently I started contacting some friends again and they wanted me to use Discord for communication. I have many objections to this, but I had no other choice. For them, using something that actually respects your privacy and isn't a centralized authority is too inconvenient, because they would only be using that one program, such as Element/Matrix, just to talk to me. This is inconsiderate for me because similarly I'm only using Discord to talk to them, but Discord is hundreds of times more popular than Element just like Windows is hundreds of times more popular than Linux. People tend to follow the crowd, and when everybody has a smartphone in their pocket it's almost second nature that they will be using these various enjoyable apps to talk to each other.
On top of that, I have a very hard time talking to people, especially when they actually ask me about about myself, because I don't know how to respond (I don't ever get asked these things). Instead most of my responses are scripted, something I picked up in order to survive school. God, I'm so glad those days are over, but it's led to more emptiness and it's getting tiring. I want to be able to speak without second-guessing everything I ever say, but no amount of practice with people I see day in and day out seems to change anything. This is part of why after I deleted social media my state of general sadness (I won't call it depression because its probably not) worsened instead of getting better, because no amount of self improvement changed anything. Surely, I've done something wrong, but like someone stuck in a hole I haven't found my way out yet.