This is the noble savage myth of the internet. Humans do fine in large groups, as evidenced by the fact that I assume nobody posting here currently lives in a tribe of 150 people. If scaling wasn't in our nature we'd probably do less of it. It's precisely one of the few things unique to our nature. As Stafford Beer said, the purpose of a system is what it does.

The problem on the internet isn't the scale, it's that social networks aren't actually social, they're just networks. What makes large groups of people successful is a social contract, common rules, values and narratives, myths. Every "social" media platform is just a glorified train station. It's not social media, just media. To this day I haven't seen one online community that say, has given itself a constitution and a form of governance.

There's two ways to solve this, none of them are reverting to some sort of paleo-internet. The first is to reappropriate the internet back into existing structures, which is happening in a lot of places as nations start to enforce existing borders and the internet just becomes part of the existing social infrastructure, another interesting one would be internet-native states, network states is a term thrown around, by somewhat cringy business gurus unfortunately.

Yes, the world was centralised, and profit motives did exist. There was a time where it looked like AOL would legitimately kill the open web, and MSN was trying too at the same time. However; the early 00's were blessed with technological limitation.

I distinctly remember the fact that IRC and the primitive forum systems we designed such that an identity tied to a real person was not something people felt the need to have. To even care what a community thinks because ultimately there's quite literally another one just around the corner.

The golden era of community creation was 2002-2004 (incidentally this is when my own IRC network formed). Because heavy handed moderation, power trips and so-on caused market pressures on moderation staff.

Too heavy handed and authoritarian: you might kill your community.

Not willing to stamp out toxic elements: you might kill your community.

That's why we're nostalgic, because simpler times was a combination of:

* more focused, human and often better moderation;

* a deluge of communities where you could find a place; even if you were weird, like me - and;

* an understanding that your identity was not important. "On the internet, nobody know's you're a dog".

Yes, there were companies and profit seeking, the web itself was mired in proprietary plugins and jank standards. But there was an ease of hosting communities that is totally lost now.

The best many of us can hope for these days, is a little carved out niche as a serf in a fiefdom.

[0]: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...

(While it's definitely a Rust "thing", if you just have a set of .md files, all you need is a "SUMMARY.md" (which contains the ToC) and a small config file; i.e., you don't have to have any Rust code to use it, and it works fine without. We document a large, mostly non-Rust codebase with it.)