Like most of the other commenters here, I agree that modern social media is often an echo chamber, and frequently surface level.

I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts, what would a social media built for nuanced, meaningful interaction look like? Could there be such a thing?

IMO it has to keep communities small and it needs moderation that is active and strictly enforces the rules of a community that are set at its inception. We see the cycle on Reddit all the time (with all the “true” subreddits)

I wrote a blog post about this a while ago if you're interested:

https://yoyo-code.com/how-to-build-better-social-media/

I think it's difficult but very interesting problem. There are some interesting attempts, like Maven, and a bunch of individually working aspects of existing platforms, but so far nothing seems to be clearly a win overall in my opinion.

I found my interactions on LiveJournal reasonably nuanced and meaningful while it lasted (2000s/2010s). It technically still exists and hasn't changed much in terms of how it works, but it just seems that all the people I knew back then have left, the company has been bought up by Russians and now it's targeting a Russian audience.

I tried to do some Mastodon, but I found there was no interaction there at all. I would just post into the void and get no reaction whatsoever. I look at the feeds to find other people to follow and there's nothing but meaningless garbage. I don't know why this is; on a purely technical level it shouldn't be fundamentally different from LiveJournal, but in practice it just is. I can only conclude that it's different people now, who don't seem to exist on my wavelength.

Search for "bridging based ranking". The X community notes algorithm does that. I think it should be applied to all content.