What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently constrained?
Going back a bit further yet, I also miss local BBSs. Some were popular while many others were not. Almost all of them regardless of popularity were a labor of love: Very few BBS sysops ever recovered what was spent to start the thing up and keep it going and it was not, broadly speaking, an inexpensive hobby. It was a mosey-losing operation.
But since long-distance telephone calls were billed by the minute, the systems were geographically-bound by the financial disincentives of far-away users. This made for tight, local communities (often with small dozens of semi-active users, and sometimes even hundreds!) and pretty effectively kept the idea of global domination-style growth off of the table.
So, again: The constraints shaped it to be how it was.
What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?
>What if they're not scaled? What if scale is inherently constrained?
Very possible. I'm on Tildes and its invite only structure prevents the infamous Eternal September effect. It also means that it's nearing a decade and is very much not going to compete with other forums as a platform.
I'm perfectly fine with that. But that doesn't seem to be what people en masse want. They want to connect with all their friends and family, and discover new ones through specialized communities. On a scale of a billion people, that's hard to manage. And if no one principled fills that void, the unprincipled will.
>What kinds of constraints might form a path towards to this kind of small success today, in 2026, while there are giants like Meta stomping around?
Plenty of methods for that, centralized or decentralized. It's less a matter of "do we have the technology/ingenuity" and more "can it defeat the massive network effects?"