here is the thing. the promise of web 2.0 was that the internet would provide a beautiful haven for free/volunteer-built utilities, and that worked for a while (probably related to the relative stability of the american imperial core). reddit chugged along great with volunteer mods, wikipedia was a bright beacon of free knowledge, archive.org was a brand new amazing resource.
those things, give or take, still exist, but the relative stability of the imperial core is faltering. the generally comfortable folks who once staffed the volunteer ranks of these utilities are no longer generally comfortable. The corporate state of america, broadly, is becoming more suspicious of these ad-hoc public utilities (in the same way that private interests always fear public resources).
so now we're in a weird state. the quasi-public resources of the past decade are retreating into their (always-extant, but rarely-enforced) private interests. broadly speaking, a lot of websites are shutting down many of the access/control routes they used to maintain in order to chase a more stable/growing/infinite profitbase (that may or may not exist). Private capital is squeezing the properties that it funded for the profit that it believes it is deserved (it is not deserved, of course, but that's capitalism. reminder that venture capitalism is, fundamentally, theft in the same way that any ownership profiteering is theft -- those who do not labor are receiving profit).
i'm not sure what happens from here. we are still in the long dark that births monsters, to bastardize gramsci. I personally believe that well-supported worker cooperatives a la Cohost are one way forward, but they require a buy-in from the public that I believe could exist but is slow to arrive. I also believe that there is a public solution, either via grants or entire maintenance, but that also feels slow to arrive.
I'm not pessimistic. I believe that what people want to exist will eventually exist, but it requires effort, evangelization, spreading the word. I would like Cohost to survive, to come out as a prominent pillar of the post-VC collapse of social media. But it will require a lot of support, and in the absence of vulture capitalism, that's gotta be us.
so anyway, buy cohost plus, and if you can, buy it multiple times.