Yes, social media. I was active in some "niche" forums (related to music scene, guitars and etc) back in the late 2000s but then Facebook started to become a thing and then Reddit, and then Twitter, Discord etc and then the rest is history.
Have you seen how active e.g. https://thegearpage.net and https://www.head-fi.org
are? If one ignores a trend one can simply outlive it, for example, some lucky developers bypassed all of the jQuery, AngularJS and non-TS React and the luckiest never even touched web front-end.
