There is no 21st century option to refuse public social media. As observed with Clearview AI, if you end up in someone's photo on a social media website you will be inadvertently added to a social and location-based graph. I believe Facebook does this internally, so if you have any friends or relatives using Facebook who uploads a picture of you, no matter how old, your social graph is present there.

And try as you may, so long as you have a phone number you will end up in someone's harvested contacts list.

the infamous shadow profiles that Zuckerberg tried to "deny" during congressional hearing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16813659

This is called a “shadow” profile, I think.

Ironically, this tool also includes HN.

    "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id={username}",

wait, that would be coincidence. It would be ironic if it were a social media site for privacy experts.

And yet, here you are.

...because any site with a discussion thread is social media. IRC and usenet are social media.

maybe email is social media?

Yea. Some mailing lists are a form of social media. Many of them are public.

IRC and twitch would be too.

When I said public i meant with my face and name.