But you do realise your advice is ignored by roughly 99.9% of people who use FB and co. and this is still where the people are?

Also, what real choices of owned plattforms besides old school forums are there?

Facebook is one of the worst places to build a community. You now have to pay to post more than two links a month, even.

And you might be impressed how far forums have come. Open source Discourse forum now has built-in Discord like voice and video chat, along with real time text posts. (It also powers some extremely large communities with millions of users.)

Oh I agree in general, I don't have FB. And discourse forum is probably what I would have tried too, but can it really scale to millions of active users? The largest I know are some linux forums, but they are way smaller.

Oh yes, it's used by Roblox, Blizzard, Unity, Epic, etc. Often the big companies remove the branding, but it's Discourse under the hood.

> what real choices of owned plattforms besides old school forums are there?

ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, to name a few.

And what thriving communities build up on those protocols?

Close-knit ones, the sort that don't trade principles for outreach.

Bully on me for expecting narcissists to grow a spine.

If everyone listened to this advice most communities would not be built

It used to be how all communities were built before the platforms.