@freakazoid Crucially, social media *didn't* originate as "a Facebook-like thing"! That's just how Silicon Valley rewrote history, basically.

I'm old enough to remember the pre-MySpace spate of social media, and they absolutely were not egocentric, even if you just count centralized platforms and not BBSes and forums and such. They were digital implementations of clubs and member organizations.

This only got supplanted by MySpace and Facebook (and the various regional me-too platforms) much later.