@Daojoan This is why I prefer Mastodon over Bluesky, Threads, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, and Discourse over Discord and Slack. Going forward, I want to minimize investing in communities that some billionaire could purchase and destroy. In the short run this means I’m missing out on participating in some communities that I might otherwise want to be a part of. But once burned, twice shy.

@Daojoan Before low cost telecommunication, community almost always meant physical proximity. There’s a lot of latency in physical proximity, it takes a lot of effort (bulldozers or bombs) to disrupt it. Now communities can break free from geography, like minded people can and do connect across the globe. It’s pretty wonderful. But there’s a lot less latency, it doesn’t take so much to disrupt a geographically dispersed community, and these online communities tend to be much more ephemeral than communities rooted in proximity. This is especially true when community members don’t have any control over the technology that is enabling the community to exist.