What worked for me was just engaging in my local community more. There are a lot of great people out there, many of them are just a few houses down from you.

I can assure you, whatever hobby or interest you have, there are others that want to do it with you too. Find those people.

Also read the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger.

In effect, I got rid of the middlemen.

I text friends and family, call a few, and ideally have people over and grill.

For news, go to the source. People used to subscribe to newspapers and magazines for every interest under the sun. Add in podcasts and newsletters.

Technically I still have an industry Slack or two and a local Discord for parents, but those are basically just more groupchat.

Also when you go to do the "what do I need from here" exercise you realize how much of it's just worthless. I dropped Reddit and added one RSS feed from a local bookstore to find out about new books.

In the end, the algorithm was an unnatural way to read.

I use Bluesky and Lemmy a bit, but not as much as I'd previously used Twitter and Reddit.