One of the great losses of the age of social media is physical community, as people substitute digital presence for in-person interactions. This is the next step with the loss of digital community.
For hackertube, the source changed from Google to HN.
Nothing lost, just the source of the truth moved.
I think there might be a lesson learned from the era of attention economy and also a potential explanation as to what advertiser friendliness was about - the attention economy did not graduate from being a surplus market. Advertisers had no incentives to subsidize the waste byproducts of fried rice stall, but the system was too deeply molded for them. The amount of standalone contents that are native to social media are tiny.
Anyway, I just don't think the contents that are made because of a social feed are the ones that weren't worth much even on social media.
But - there's no reason this couldn't actually be a good thing. I can totally imagine a platform[0] where the focus is less on creation and more on curation. I sub to some person or community who's going to share good links, and I see only that, instead of the slop firehose from The Algorithm.
(and yes, social media was already more like this, in the early days).
[0] and platform implies more than I mean, could just be some nice wrapper around RSS or activitypub or whatever