From my POV all we need to do is post and comment and create good communities. The people will come naturally if we do that.

I miss the days of messageboards and IRC rooms. Back in the day, Nintendo had a messageboard (the Hyrule Town Square and then the NSider Forums) and I was somewhat active on both of those. I even ran my own messageboard and made some good friends I still talk to to this day on another forum. There was an IRC room I'd hang out in a decade ago before they mostly all moved over to Discord.

Yes i was amongst the irc chat netizens from back then and I like the retro style feel now!

Someone posted a link a while ago to an article called killing community. I believe it speaks what I've been thinking for a while. I've quit so many social media over such a long time but I'm also part of a small community of friends. We Have our own little corner of the internet with file sharing and things like password manager and chat server and so on. We've been going strong for 15 years and going. Growth at all costs destroys communities.

yup, I agree. I forgot how much better smaller communities are now that I haven't used reddit in about a week. much less garbage on my feed that will eventually start to grow

After a certain point, change for the sake of change is undesirable.