Nearly two decades ago, Facebook exploded on college campuses as a site for students to keep in touch. Then came Twitter, where people posted what they ate for breakfast, and Instagram, where friends shared photos to keep track of each other.
These days, Instagram and Facebook feeds are full of ads and sponsored posts. TikTok and Snapchat are full of videos from influencers promoting dish soap and dating apps. And soon, Twitter posts that get the most visibility will come primarily from subscribers who pay for the visibility and other benefits.
Social media is becoming less social in many ways. The kind of posts where people update friends and family on their lives have become harder to see over the years as the biggest sites have become more and more “corporatized.” Instead of seeing posts and photos from friends and family about their vacations or fancy dinners, users of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat now often see professional content from brands, influencers and others who pay for posting.
The change has implications for major social network companies and how people interact digitally. But it also raises questions about a core idea: the online platform. For years, the idea of a platform — an all-in-one, public site where people spent most of their time — reigned supreme. But as major social networks made connecting people with brands a priority over connecting with other people, some users have turned to community-based sites and apps dedicated to specific hobbies and issues.
“Platforms as we knew them are over,” says Zizi Papacharissi, a communications professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago who teaches social media courses. “They have outlived their usefulness.”
The shift helps explain why some social networking companies, which still have billions of users and rake in billions of dollars in revenue, are now exploring new business avenues. Twitter, which is owned by Elon Musk, has pushed people and brands to pay $8 to $1,000 a month to become a subscriber. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, ventures into 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 drawn to smaller, more targeted sites. These include Mastodon, which is essentially a Twitter clone broken up into communities; Nextdoor, a social network for neighbors to commiserate with everyday issues like local potholes; and apps like Truth Social, which was started by former President Donald J. Trump and is seen as a social network for conservatives.
“It’s not about choosing one network to run them all — that’s idiotic Silicon Valley logic,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “The future is that you’re a member of dozens of different communities, because that’s how we are as people.”
Twitter, which automatically responds to press inquiries with a poop emoji, did not comment on the evolution of social networks. Meta declined to comment and TikTok did not respond to a request for comment. Snap, the creator of Snapchat, said that while the app had evolved, connecting people with their friends and family remained its primary function.
A shift to 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, founder of Twitter.
In 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post that private messaging and small groups were the fastest growing areas of online communication. Mr Dorsey, who stepped down as CEO of Twitter in 2021, has pushed for so-called decentralized social networks that give people control over the content they see and the communities they interact with. He recently posted on Nostr, a social media site based on this principle.
Over the past year, technologists and academics have also focused on smaller social networks. In an article published last month entitled “The Three-Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet,” Mr. Zuckerman and other academics how future companies could run small networks at low cost.
They also proposed creating an app that essentially acts as a Swiss army knife of social networking by allowing people to switch between the sites they use, including Twitter, Mastodon, Reddit, and smaller networks. One of those apps, called Gobo and developed by MIT Media Lab and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will be released next month.
The hard part for users is finding the newer, small networks because they are obscure. But broader social networks, such as Mastodon or Reddit, often act as gateways to smaller communities. For example, when signing up to Mastodon, people can choose a server from an extensive list, including those related to gaming, food, and activism.
Eugen Rochko, CEO of Mastodon, said users published more than a billion posts a month in its communities and there were no algorithms or ads changing people’s feeds.
A big advantage of small networks is that they create forums for specific communities, including those who are marginalized. Founded in 2011, Ahwaa is a social network for members of the LGBTQ community in countries around the Persian Gulf where being gay is considered illegal. Other small networks, such as Letterboxd, an app for movie buffs to share their thoughts on movies, focus on special interests.
Smaller communities can also alleviate the social pressure of using social media, especially for younger people. Over the past decade, stories have emerged — including during congressional hearings on the dangers of social media — about teens developing eating disorders after trying to conform to “Instagram-perfect” photos and from watching videos on TikTok.
The idea that a new social media site could emerge to become 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 thing.
“They won’t be swayed by the first shiny platform that comes along,” Ms. Papacharissi said.
People’s online identities will become increasingly fragmented across multiple sites, she added. To talk about professional achievements, there’s LinkedIn. There is Discord for playing video games with fellow gamers. For discussing news stories 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 a student in 2004, began a research program aimed at rebooting social media. The program helps students and others to create and experiment with new networks together.
An app that grew out of the program, Minus, only allows users to publish 100 posts to their timeline for life. The idea is to make people feel connected in an environment where their time together is treated as a precious and finite resource, unlike traditional social networks like Facebook and Twitter that use infinite scrolling interfaces to keep users engaged for as long as possible.
“It’s a performance art experiment,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law and computer science professor who started the research initiative. “It’s the kind of thing that once you see it, it doesn’t have to be.”
