What I've long wondered is- would it really be that hard/expensive to build an open source social media alternative that does exactly that? Updates & photos from friends & family, in chronological order, and little else. Social media has been around for a while now, I have to imagine that most of the hard problems around a customized feed and so on have been solved. Probably some idealistic ex-FB and IG engineers would join on, so we'd have their domain expertise. I bet some prominent, wealthy anti-FB types could kick in some seed money to get it off the ground. It could be set up as a non-profit, B corp or foundation of some sort.... You could run non-targeted display ads for brand advertising to help cover costs, with the added lure for advertisers that the site would be brand-friendly because it's non-controversial.

Of course it wouldn't have sophisticated features like photo tagging and such, and probably wouldn't be Hip And Cool for Gen Z, but it could be a functional bare-bones Facebook replacement. You'd have probably have to disable virality features, and maybe linking to external news sites just to prevent your racist uncle from posting Breitbart links, I don't know.

Would that really be so hard? Or do the servers, hosting, security and moderation costs just scale exponentially after some threshold of say 10 million users or what have you? Supposedly Instagram was running with a very small team when Facebook acquired them