All of social media suffers from a paradox: you need enough users contributing valuable content to make it worth showing up, but not so many that it degrades to

All of social media suffers from a paradox: you need enough users contributing valuable content to make it worth showing up, but not so many that it degrades to memes. The key benefit to centralized social networks is solving this by having a huge user base but letting you curate the content you engage with (subscribing to users, joining subreddits, etc.). Small forums have a huge discovery problem. I loved forums, but with the modern legal landscape, liability for uploaded content, DMCA requests, etc. I would never want to run/moderate one - and that was true even before the current swarm of LLM-generated spam.