Comment by Barrin92
>It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes.
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.
Here is more akin to a forum (or gathering in a physical sense) than a community. I only know a few usernames and that's because I've heard of the person behind each. The only central theme behind all my interactions is finding a post interesting, then reply to a comment once I've got something to say. I'm not interested in any individual, only on the discussion. Social media wants you to care, and care about a lot of things that are mostly irrelevant to your life.