Niche online communities offer something previous generations lacked: the ability to find your specific kind of person, anywhere in the world, without waiting for them to turn up in your town. The obsessive, the rare, the particular — these people can now find each other and form genuine communities of interest and care. That these communities can also calcify into insularity and radicalization is real; the same specificity that enables deep belonging can produce deep exclusion of everything outside.
Each step builds on the last.