Technology

Agreed. The community MUST own it's own platform or else they're just renters that can be evicted the minute someone thinks they can make money from them.

This also isn't just an online issue (though my view is US-centric). There's been a lot of talk about the decline of a '3rd place' and its loss impacting social gatherings. You have your house, work, and then your social spaces, and there's a very big lack of social places where gathering and relaxing are acceptable without also having to engage in buying permission to be there.

This carried over into a lot of people going online to find the same social gatherings, and then seeing the gathering places turned into profit centers for the owners without any discussion with the users of the space, and now they're finding that they don't have anywhere to go be social, and the online places that filled that gap are now vanishing as well.

Now I'm not a sociologist (just a simple country computer janitor), but it strongly feels like a lot of the hyper-tribalism and aggressiveness that people are exhibiting are a direct result of having all the social spaces torn away and turned into profit centers, with zero regards for the people who visited or contributed to them.

It just makes everyone more isolated and willing to hop on to whatever the next big 'social trend' that some algorithm drops in front of them, and I think at this point it's pretty unarguable that what the algorithms are doing is not always benign. You gain a place to belong, even if what you're belonging to is abhorrent and toxic.