I think small communities dying out is acceptable as long as they can be brought back by the members. That was one of the appeals of twitter for example. You c

I think small communities dying out is acceptable as long as they can be brought back by the members. That was one of the appeals of twitter for example. You could get that tight nit group and maybe it kinda dies out for a year or two but something revitalized the community and it came back. With smaller, centralised communities this falls apart unfortunately since you have to rely on the host to maintain that service and if they shut it down, it's just gone. Federated services on the other hand have the advantage that as long as the participants continue to be part of that community, it can be revived on demand. So in this sense, I think some of the major issues that prevented small communities from persisting and thriving have been solved. Of course like you mentioned the moderation, growth management, and UX aspects have yet to be solved but those have the advantage of being able to be largely independent of the core functionality and can be improved with time without breaking the world. I also think the twitter approach to community formation works really well here. It has it's own issues but a lot of the more niche twitter communities tend to just fracture back into manageable micro-communities once they get bigger than a certain size. It's not as noticeable since what community you see depends on who you follow but it's 100% a thing that happens. I've personally seen it happen more times than I can count at this point. Two solutions for intentionally keeping communities small and preventing low quality content are making joining "referral only" (like https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/ for example) or requiring small fee entry (like https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php https://forums.somethingawful.com/index.php) but each of those has their own problem. The prior has an issue of creating echo chambers as only "like minded individuals" can/will join while the latter can promote the exclusion of less well off individuals or those in regions with limited access to digital finance as well as posing a privacy concern unless some form of privacy preserving money is used. Honestly I'm excited. Social Media from a technical perspective is finally getting interesting again.