I think the only sustainable form of online interaction is the small group– be it a Discord server, a Mastodon instance, an email cc’d to a dozen friends who’ve been replying to each other on it for a year, or what-the-heck-ever.
And I’m not saying such online groups are likely to be sustainable individually. I’m saying that 1. they theoretically CAN be, and 2. when they fail they aren’t utterly destroyed or fundamentally changed in their nature, they just break up into similar small groups that retain whichever social connections want to continue.
And this is a feature that only small groups can really manage…
(cw: troubling and depressing thoughts about Moderation Drama, debates over banned content and the boundaries thereof, potentially triggering topics)
bringing this post back too… because of the precarious position of Tumblr, and the current focus on finding other places to connect.
Some of the challenges of that are… very present in my mind right now.