Hmmm. I'm sympathetic to this perspective, I've sketched ideas for social media that was more "friends of friends" oriented (specifically I want to have a platform based around collections of media - I create a collection, upload some pdfs and videos and markdown files etc, and start serving those via torrent. Peers that happen to place the same file in their own collections suddenly become co-seeders. I want to see "what other collections does this file appear in" and make friends that way. I feel like limewire used to work like this, you find someone with a grateful dead bootleg and wonder, what other files are they serving? I also use ebay kinda like this, find an interesting item and look at "sellers others items")
Anyway, I agree that a social graph has the potential to offer human-scale and $5-VPS-scale discoverability. The problem is probably with user expectation and network effect. How do you get people to use the thing when no one is using it yet, to bootstrap to the point where you might actually bump into someone with the same niche interest as you. Still, it could start with small communities same way telegram group chats and discord servers do. You just have to bring the people to you instead of just trying to index the firehose of global content.
Anyway, I agree that a social graph has the potential to offer human-scale and $5-VPS-scale discoverability. The problem is probably with user expectation and network effect. How do you get people to use the thing when no one is using it yet, to bootstrap to the point where you might actually bump into someone with the same niche interest as you. Still, it could start with small communities same way telegram group chats and discord servers do. You just have to bring the people to you instead of just trying to index the firehose of global content.