A dazzle of Slack bases, Discords, Telegrams, and Circles later, and it feels like we’ve arrived somewhere. Maybe it’s the post-social media era, where people move off the open platforms and into a curated mosaic of niche, private, and cooperative spaces. Or, maybe it’s just that the web we needed was here when we needed it.

In the post-hipster era, you listened to what Spotify told you to listen to. If you read a book, it was because the precise pattern of blobby pastel-coloured shapes on its cover contained coded instructions to TikTok’s algorithm that sent it zooming to the top of your feed. Your tastes and preferences were decided for you by vast crystalline machin... See more