I read an interesting point which I hadn't realized before. Discussions on current social media are always current, not long term. You open the app or website to see what's going on now. When you comment, it's soon lost to history, buried by newer stuff. If you happen on a post more than a day or two old, it doesn't make sense to comment as it's already passed and nobody will read your reply. You're not building anything of long term value. It was not like this in forums that predated social media. You could reply to a years old thread, and it would be bumped to the head of the queue. I suppose both the form of social media with its feeds and the algorithms designed to hook you and make you come for more are to blame.
How could we make kbin or fediverse in general more purposeful long term and less for instant gratification? Going back to old forum form is probably not the answer, but maybe something between feeds and forums or even something entirely new? With fediverse we have the opportunity to build something better and more useful than what we have now, as we are not bound by the economic imperative to make the users hooked.
I'd say there's no "what if". We can already know that they both are and are not building blocks of something greater.
What are atoms building blocks of? Nothing. Combining atoms to form a parsley doesn't actually make anything new. Nothing emerges from combining atoms. There is no "parsley", there's just atoms.
Similarly solar systems form galaxies, they form galaxy clusters etc. But a galaxy is nothing but a collection of solar systems etc.
However, the direction of causation is not only from small to big. The big also influences the small, and actually also determines it. For example the position and movement of the small is influenced by the big. Its position and movement is what the small actually is, as being in a different place or moving differently it would be something else that what it is now. You can't separate a thing's position from what that thing is. And more fundamentally, a thing is its interactions with other things. Outside of its effects on other things, you can't observe a thing, and those effects are the only existence of that thing.
In that sense you could say that atoms and solar systems are not building blocks of bigger things, as there are no fundamental building blocks and no things that are built either. There is just a network of things, none of which exist as independent things other than mutually determining and being determined by the network.