The people who did it are the same wealthy anti-progressive, anti-New Dealers who hated how the government did so many programs that didn’t just work, but worked brilliantly. I need to mention that not all New Deal programs survived, but most of the ones that were cut were done so due to early concerted opposition to them and nothing organic.
No joke, it is a combination of old ideas and opposition to new ideas.
In the same way that email has been decentralized from the get go, social media could have been equally decentralized, and I don’t mean in the older php forums, but in a different way that would allow people to reconnect with others and maintain contacts.