No idea if my reply will help you, but I'll give it a try by telling my own experience.
I realized I don't want to be part of this mainstream bullshit. A few years ago back when I did my only year of college I tried to be mainstream, but it made my mental health so awful (it was awful in the first place) that it literally collapsed on itself. I had to face that truth that I was never cut out for the mainstream stuff, that it felt empty, that interacting with it was a pain. In late 2019 I deleted facebook and insta and never felt better. I have a dummy account on insta for when people send me links leading there but that's it. I have a VK account for sharing my art on a page and finding interesting pics you can only find on the Russian webz but I sometimes feel like deleting it too. I like VK's music system though, not gonna lie. But I, for example, have unsubscribed from my friends' activity because I don't care what they are up to, I mean I can still chat them up on telegram.
My phone is an "outdated" (I mean... 3 or so years old?) model rotting in a drawer most of the time and I, like, only get it out for confirmation SMS or sending a voice/video message to my friends on telegram. I was never much addicted to my phone, I mostly used it as a music player/alarm clock and always felt like I was losing IQ every time I looked at it in the street, and for 2 years I didn't even have a phone at all. I don't care for Netflix. I don't care for Youtube except for music, some interesting shows like "I shouldn't be alive", "Mystery diagnosis" and the like maybe, but the whole youtuber culture completely flies over my head. TikTok is probably the worst thing I've ever seen come out these last years. Thankfully I got my best friend to uninstall it when I showed her a video about TikTok and China's influence and all. She's been wasting less time since then and her mental health improved a bit. I'm gonna delete >reddit
soon, I gave it a try again but... eh, honestly, ever since I found Agora Road, >reddit
just doesn't feel interesting to me. It was cool back in 2015 or so, I was a teenager and spent half my time on there, but that's it. I think I should even stop googling answers to the questions that pop into my head and trust myself, for once, because probably the answers are within, not without.
Once you accept that there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with you, on the contrary, that it's absolutely GREAT that you aren't brainwashed by these dopamine machines made to break your reward system, it's actually very empowering. Not in an edgelord way, but you realize that the experience you find on these sites is mostly very curated by algorithms. I'd not be surprised if the Dead Internet theory was at least partially true. The Internet does feel emptier than ever. Neocities, AgoraRoad and co are a much more organic and enriching version of the Internet. I like spending time late in the evening reading replies on threads here, even if I may not participate. It just feels great. Sure, it doesn't look as smooth as social media in design, but I prefer this aesthetic anyway. I find that a lot of modern stuff is very... ugly anyway. Soulless. Made for conformity rather than bringing out our individuality.
I hope this answers your question. I wouldn't call myself based, I'd just say I'm a normal person who just happened to never be into the mainstream stuff and finally stopped forcing herself to like it.