Social vs. parasocial is simply a matter of the scale of any one node.
An individual (or organisation) can only maintain so may relationships. Dunbar's Number is a pretty good proxy. Ultimately, what each relationship is competing for is time, and that is a nonfungible resource. Ultimately, our relationships are defined largely by arity, the number of connections between parties and communications, the n:m relationships: 1:1, n:1, 1:m, n:m.
The vital groups I've been involved with have been 1) highly curated and 2) about 40--50 people, of whom maybe 10--20 were highly active. (One such group was a privat G+ community. Whilst it lasted it was excellent. I ultimately opted to kill it off due to concerns with the platform.)
A person, or a group, with more than a few hundred followers, can at best devote only a few minutes or seconds to each.
Over an 80 year life, the time you can devote to individual members of a group (assuming you sleep 8 hours/day) is roughly:
10: 5 years
100: 6 months
1,000: 20 days
10,000: 47 hours
100,000: 5 hours
1,000,000: 28 minutes
10 million: 3 minutes
100 million: 17 seconds
1 billion: 2 seconds
10 billion: 1/4 second
Google+ existed for slightly less than 8 years, and had (generously) 3.3 billion profiles. Each user could interact with each of the others for ... 0.05 seconds.
If we rely on a more realistic estimate of about 100 million actively-engaged profiles, that engagement increases considerably to ... 1 2/3 seconds.
In a parasocial relationship the fandom devotes a significant portion of its life to the star (often minutes or hours per day). The star ... cannot devote much time to individual fans.
The largest followings on G+ tended to be around the 10 million mark, allowing about 17 seconds of star attention per fan if the star devoted every waking hour to such relationships.
My more modest 2,000 or so followers might have received a days' attention from me, were I particularly obsessed with such engagement.
In practice, most of my engagement was with 20--100 or so people. Several of those I've continued to stay in touch with.
We seem to be under the delusion that technology allows us to scale intimacy. That's a fundamental impossibility, as true intimacy (measured in both time and distance) simply cannot be mediated. The problem isn't just the arity mentioned above, but context, expectations, understandings, intentions, and more. Intermediated communications quickly gets quite complex. Intimacy does not scale.
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/4bdf7470aa0301394c70002590d8e...