Niches nowdays are far deeper and more vibrant than they were 20 years ago. Instead of 1 guys website or 1 fourm with 30 users you now have many discord servers with 1000s of users talking in real time, youtube channels putting out videos and making money, reddit/lemmy aggregating content, the community interacting in real time and building what it needs.

And they have to self censor so they don't get banned off those platforms.

There are so many piracy discords where you can't ask how to pirate something because that's against discord rules. I mean really? Why are you using it then?