The reality is that most people do not care enough about the systems of life to educate themselves, and bad actors exploited this constant lowering of the barrier to entry by flooding these forced-participants with advertising, "free" services, and a glut of cognitohazards. We created a world where authenticity comes not from expertise, but how pretty and usable your website is - and that had knock-on effects our elders tried to warn us about (just look at games like Deus Ex, System Shock 1/2, and similar cyberpunk games of the era and how they warned about mass surveillance, forced adoption of technologies, centralization of infrastructure, etc).
> ...if we want good, nice things, we'll have to actively work for them and defend daily.
This is what I've been trying to instill in others for nearly twenty years, since my days of playing SysAdmin in High School and bypassing proxy-based web filters to get to Newgrounds. To truly be participatory in any community, you must volunteer time in bettering it somehow. Maybe volunteer to be a moderator and improve site policies, or donate surplus resources towards self-hosting, or just helping folks move to better, less centralized or more community-supported platforms.