Almost two decades ago, Facebook exploded on college campuses as a website for students to keep in touch. Then came Twitter, where people shared their breakfast dishes, and Instagram, where friends shared photos to catch up with each other.
Today it’s Instagram and Facebook feeds full of ads and sponsored posts. TikTok and Snapchat are crammed with videos of influencers promoting dish soap and dating apps. And soon, the Twitter posts that gain the most visibility will mostly come from subscribers who Pay for exposure and other perks.
Social media is becoming less social in many ways. The type of posts people use to update friends and family about their lives has become increasingly difficult to spot over the years as the biggest websites have become increasingly “corporated”. Instead of seeing messages and photos from friends and family about their vacation or fancy dinners, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat users now often view professional content from brands, influencers, and others who pay for placement.
The change impacts large social networking companies and how people interact with each other digitally. But it also raises questions about a core idea: the online platform. For years, the idea of a platform—an all-encompassing, publicly accessible website where people spent most of their time—was unavoidable. But as major social networks have made connecting people with brands a priority over connecting with other people, some users have started looking for community-oriented sites and apps dedicated to specific hobbies and topics.
“Platforms as we knew them are over,” said Zizi Papacharissi, a communications professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago who teaches social media courses. “They have outlived their usefulness.”
This shift helps explain why some social networking companies that continue to have billions of users and billions in revenue are now embracing new business opportunities. Elon Musk-owned Twitter has been pushing people and brands to pay $8 to $1,000 a month become a subscriber. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is moving to the immersive online world of the so-called metaverse.
For users, this means that instead of spending all their time on one or a few major social networks, some are gravitating towards smaller, more focused sites. These include mastodonwhich is essentially a community-split Twitter clone; Next door, a social network for neighbors to complain about everyday issues like local potholes; and apps like truth socialwhich was launched by former President Donald J. Trump and is considered a social network for conservatives.
“It’s not about picking one network that rules them all — that’s Silicon Valley mad logic,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “The future is that you’ll be a member of dozens of different communities, because that’s how we humans are.”
Twitter, which automatically responds to press inquiries with a poop emoji, did not comment on the development of the social networks. Meta declined comment and TikTok did not respond to a request for comment. Snap, the maker of Snapchat, said that while its app has evolved, connecting people with their friends and family remains its primary function.
A shift toward smaller, more focused networks was predicted years ago by some of social media’s biggest names, including Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter.
That’s what Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post in 2019 private messaging and small groups were the fastest growing areas of online communication. Mr. Dorsey, who stepped down as Twitter’s chief executive in 2021, has been pushing for so-called decentralized social networks that put people in control of the content they see and the communities they engage with. He recently posted on nostra social media site based on this principle.
Over the past year, technologists and academics have also focused on smaller social networks. In a piece of paper Published last month and titled “The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet,” Mr. Zuckerman and other academics outlined how future companies could run small networks at low cost.
They also proposed creating an app that would essentially act as a social media swiss army knife by allowing people to switch between the websites they use, including Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, and smaller networks. Such an app called gobos and developed by the MIT Media Lab and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is slated for release next month.
The hard part for users is finding the newer, small networks as they are opaque. But broader social networks like Mastodon or Reddit often act as gateways to smaller communities. For example, when you sign up for Mastodon, you can choose a server from one extensive listincluding those related to gaming, food, and activism.
Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s chief executive, said that users made over a billion posts to its communities monthly and that there were no algorithms or ads altering people’s feeds.
A major advantage of small networks is that they create forums for specific communities, including people who are marginalized. Ahwa, founded in 2011, is a social network for members of the LGBTQ community in countries around the Persian Gulf where being gay is illegal. Other small networks, such as letterboxdan app for movie enthusiasts to share their opinions on movies focus on special interests.
Smaller communities can also reduce the social pressures of using social media, especially for younger people. Over the past decade, stories have surfaced — including in congressional hearings about the dangers of social media Adolescents develop eating disorders after trying to live up to “Instagram Perfect” photos and watching videos on TikTok.
The idea that a new social media site could be the one app for everyone seems unrealistic, experts say. When young people are done experimenting with a new network — like BeReal, the photo-sharing app that was popular with teens last year but is now Bleeding millions of active users – they move on to the next.
“You’re not going to be swayed by the first shiny platform that comes along,” said Ms. Papacharissi.
People’s online identities are becoming increasingly fragmented across multiple websites, she added. To talk about professional achievements, there is LinkedIn. For playing video games with other players there is discord. For discussion of messages there is Artifact.
“What we’re interested in is smaller groups of people communicating with each other about specific things,” Ms. Papacharissi said.
More small networks are likely on the horizon. Last year, Harvard University, where Mr. Zuckerberg founded Facebook as an undergraduate in 2004, launched a research program dedicated to rebooting social media. The program helps students to build and experiment with new networks together.
An app that emerged from the program, Minus, allows users to limit their lifetime to 100 posts on their timeline. The idea is for people to feel connected in an environment where their time together is treated as a precious and limited resource, unlike traditional social networks like Facebook and Twitter that use infinite scrolling interfaces to keep users engaged for as long as possible possible to employ.
“It’s a performance art experiment,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law and computer science professor who created the research initiative. “It’s like, once you see it, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.”
