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Originally Posted by webecedarian
... some users have started seeking community-oriented sites and apps devoted to specific hobbies and issues.
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Like this site...
Community oriented websites devoted to specific hobbies or issues predate so called "social networks".
The articles says:
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“It’s not about choosing one network to rule them all — that is crazy Silicon Valley logic,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “The future is that you’re a member of dozens of different communities, because as human beings, that’s how we are.“
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However, sites like this one exist precisely because there is a "one network to rule them all": the World Wide Web. Before the web there where many network platforms people used to communicate and share data online (USENET, FTP, Gopher etc.) but only the emergence of the World Wide Web as one global network that replaced all of these created the environment for all these communities like the one we have here.
The thing is that these are networks that are not owned by someone: The World Wide Web, based on HTTP, an open protocol that allows everyone to create websites and to access anyone's website, using their choice of browser that is not limited by the control of a single entity whose aim is to profit from the network. This on top the Internet, another global network based on the TCP/IP suite of open protocols that are also not subject to the control of a single owner.
The same is with email: a single global network built on a free an open protocol, SMTP, that is not owned by any single owner and allows anyone to connect with anyone else on the network, without having to be customers of the same commercial entity whose interests lie elsewhere. Email would not have worked if one needed to be a user of Gmail to correspond with users of Gmail and a user of Outlook to communicate with users of Outlook etc.