For a month it showed me a grid of blurred squares and a running count of people who had apparently liked me. I paid, because of course I did, and behind the blur were four faces I had already seen on the free side and one account that had not been touched since winter. This is not a complaint about money. It is a complaint about a model that invents a hidden room and then sells you the key.
Twenty nine, south east, submissive, two years in. What I worked out afterwards is that a paywall cannot manufacture people. If eleven of us are within reach then eleven of us are within reach, and blurring us does not make it twelve. The platform is not lying exactly. It is charging for the removal of an obstacle it built itself.
So I went to the written kind instead, where nothing is hidden because there is nothing to hide behind. It is uglier, slower, and it makes me actually write something. Fewer answers arrive and every one of them is from a person who read a paragraph.
What I want is structure that survives an ordinary Tuesday. Rules, check ins, somebody who notices when I go quiet rather than assuming I have gone off them. Not looking for a correspondence that never becomes a meeting. Not looking for anybody who wants to move to a different platform inside four messages. And not looking to be somebody's experiment in whether they enjoy being in charge.