I have known dozens of people who would gladly pay $20 a month to have a platform where they can freely share their writings and discuss with like-minded people -- small clubs, if you will.
Some still use Facebook and complain about limitations to this day. Though as much as I'll never like Facebook, they do a good job and have the functionality; where they lose people is starting to shove irrelevant seemingly outrageous posts to make people click on more stuff.
Medium and Twitter have a real thing going on where they absolutely can monetize part of their user base. Have 50k people pay $20 a month, you got $1M monthly revenue. Easier said than done of course but it's achievable. There are a lot of book and art nerds out there and not all of them count pennies.
The internet business models largely missed out on such opportunities. They are myopic and laser-focus on what SEEMS to be the biggest earning strategy to them. They completely miss the fact that people still love to gather and discuss with like-minded people.
Finally, of course there are other services doing this for free so the value proposition might be hard -- but again, it's achievable. Remove trackers, minimize telemetry (as a dev I understand you can't do without 100% of it), remove ads for paid users, make the site fast. People will hear about it and come.
But of course, somebody in the board says "we need more engagement and more ad revenue next month" and all mid- and long-term strategies get thrown in the bin right there and then. A kinda sorta tragedy of the commons thing in internet creator monetization businesses.