Well, no, as a matter of fact, I didn't because I spend a lot of time making new friends, and a lot of my fandom friends are people I hang out with offline.
But the move to ever more human-hostile social media did kill the feeling of community in a lot of niche hobbies for huge numbers of people. Overall access is easier, which is great because people who'd never have found their source of fun find it now, but it also tends to turn a lot of things into the equivalent of a youtube comments section. You know: hostile drive-by randos weighing in on shit they don't understand every two seconds.
I'm perfectly comfortable generalizing that our increasingly shitty platforms have fucked over community repeatedly even if some of us are finding ways to make things work.
I feel like the tags were meant to be kind of a "gotcha". As in, "ha, you lost community, loser, but I'm better at socializing, so suck it!", which is fascinating because 1., that's a lot of insecurity on display and 2., it doesn't really address the issue of how hostile fandom is, offer solutions, or help anyone trying to find less hostile spaces find them. It's very much the vibe of 'fuck you, got mine', which... I'll be honest, I'm glad this person has found community far away from me, because 'fuck you, got mine' is a very middle school attitude and most of us have moved past it.
A reality some people don't want to face is that yes, fandom spaces have gotten more hostile. They have gotten increasingly combative, competitive, and toxic. Fandoms and canons get abandoned quickly, drama and bad faith "critique" get more engagement than actual fandom, and it's very hard to form lasting connections with people. And I get not wanting to think about those things, because it's not a happy thought. I get that going, "well I managed fine" is tempting because it puts the onus onto people to somehow avoid all the toxicity of social media and not on social media, which some people see as above criticism. It's a very easy way of looking at the world in which there are no big problems with social media and everything is fine.
It's just also super inaccurate because as anyone from the LiveJournal era would tell you (and as my sister told me), curated spaces for specific things used to be a lot more common, toxic people got booted out of spaces once the moderators were aware of them, and conversation with others instead of one-off comments used to be more common. Things were never perfect or even great, but they were, in fact, better than they are now.
And as much as "fuck you, got mine" feels good, if you ever lose your community and have to find a new one, all the shitty things you don't want to think of as real problems on social media? They're going to still be there.
Yeah, you have community, dear original tagger. But could you find another one if you had to? Could you do it with the same ease as before?
Giving the benefit of the doubt, I'm guessing I sounded like an Old moaning about how the kids these days don't understaaaand.
(And I do see some people thinking the platforms are the main issue and then describing what it's like to be 20 and in college making friends with all the people in your dorm who also like anime vs. what it's like to try to build new friend groups as a 40-something after moving cities for a job.)
But the fact that I'm having more fun in fandom than ever doesn't change the internet landscape. It's not even a fandom problem: it's a whole internet problem. Google search results are ever more bullshit. Dropshipping and fake reviews have polluted every shopping site. Etsy is full of mass produced garbage instead of handmade things. Everything has an algorithm and no index. Every platform is designed to cause context collapse and shove people who would be happier apart into each other's comments sections. etc. etc.
Fandom is suffering these changes along with every other hobby/subculture/community.
