> In my experience over the last decade there are fewer and fewer ways to find a community and any success as a creator of any kind without getting corralled into social media and furthermore getting corralled into being a daily active user / consumer as to not get shadow banned by any given app.
I spent a good chunk of my career in platform engineering. I generally worked on internal hosting platforms, but there's enough correlation between those and large online platforms. These platforms must knock out competition, this delivers some benefits to the end user but as an intended byproduct it eliminates choice. If you are anything but someone who wants a boilerplate to build on, say you want to do something custom or special, that will always be out of the question -- because deviation introduces risk of various types.
It's a tradeoff, and for now it's a sufficiently good tradeoff for the public until they become aware of what they bought.
I spent a good chunk of my career in platform engineering. I generally worked on internal hosting platforms, but there's enough correlation between those and large online platforms. These platforms must knock out competition, this delivers some benefits to the end user but as an intended byproduct it eliminates choice. If you are anything but someone who wants a boilerplate to build on, say you want to do something custom or special, that will always be out of the question -- because deviation introduces risk of various types.
It's a tradeoff, and for now it's a sufficiently good tradeoff for the public until they become aware of what they bought.