Tho it hasn't always been like that. Mid-90's Internet feels like utopia compared to our modern social reality dominated Internet.
When you met somebody online back then, you were just happy to have found somebody else. They didn't have profiles and pictures allowing you to put people into boxes before even talking with them.
People actually had to talk to each other to find out more about whom they were talking to, it required actual back and forth interaction and not just browsing a half-invented profile page to use that as "ammunition" to put somebody else down for their listed views/positions.
There were rudimentary profiles. If you "fingered⁕" someone, you could see the contents of their ~/.plan and ~/.project files, which formed something like a profile.
In some sense, for some people, I think that's true. FB and IG certainly foster certain types of mimetic desires. But I think for the rest, it's less homogeneous in what we're seeing. When people used to watch TV, there was much more of a consensus on how we defined ourselves. That's going away.
When you met somebody online back then, you were just happy to have found somebody else. They didn't have profiles and pictures allowing you to put people into boxes before even talking with them.
People actually had to talk to each other to find out more about whom they were talking to, it required actual back and forth interaction and not just browsing a half-invented profile page to use that as "ammunition" to put somebody else down for their listed views/positions.