Certainly true in some cases. People also migrate as a flock to a new thing and stay if enough of their friends moved if there are enough colorful flashy widgets. I see it more as corporate capture and mass surveillance for sales, marketing, selling trends to governments and many other reasons. Those of us that remained in our little isolated bubbles are also on those platforms and remain connected even if the platforms get too censorious or controlling. People are less afraid of being "cancelled" if they have a place to fall back on.

I totally get it. Having small semi-private bubbles escapes the top-down. There will always be someone operating a forum but anyone can run a forum, especially today with tools to automate deploying them. I see each forum as a distributed directory of categories that are independent from the corporate capture top down. No corporate, no capture, only as censorious as each admin. Forum operators are only beholden to the law. Reputation systems are no perfect as they can amplify echo chambers which HN and Reddit are certainly not immune to. They are quite the double edged sword and create their own sub-class of enshittification which I must compensate for by removing karma from my view. Nothing is perfect nor ever will be. I will always use a balanced combination of walled off forums and bigger platforms like this to dip my toe into the pool of the masses which I can escape any time I want a break from it.