At the time, I was under the impression that those platforms enhance existing social relations while providing the impetus to the formation of new ones. Social media, federated or centralised, condition the user to make low effort posts in order to stay in that short-term loop of seeking validation and responding to momentary stimuli. The type of “good read” comment I alluded to above is not engendered by the ruthless for-profit nature of the mainstream platforms: humans do this all the time to show off and/or gain attention (and platformarchs exploit it with impunity).