Gabbie Romano is a major contributor to the Bagels Who Discuss Facebook group, an inclusive space for people in the Chapel Hill-Durham, North Carolina, area. This means that Romano is one of the most active members of the private group, sharing posts and commenting on others to provide advice, recommendations, and support, which is the purpose of the group. But she wasn’t always active in Facebook groups like Bagels.
Over the past few years, Romano has noticed some changes in her use of other social media, particularly Instagram. Comments under creator posts seem to be meaner, more critical, and increasingly difficult to deal with than before. She found herself constantly comparing herself to others and falling down rabbit holes, which was detrimental to her mental health.
“I ended up in an unconscious spiral that never felt good but was very difficult to escape,” she said.
This is why Romano deleted her Instagram app. Now, she mainly uses the Facebook group, which is where we connect. She also uses subreddits, where she finds people with similar interests, including local foodie and hiking groups and interior design AMA groups.
Romano’s experience is just one of many examples as some social media users have migrated to and adopted new, smaller online spaces. As a social media journalist, I’ve noticed this trend in my own life and work. So I spoke with some experts to explore how big this trend is, how it’s manifesting, and whether these small spaces are here to stay.
What is a small social media platform?
Small social media groups are, as the name suggests, online spaces designed to connect smaller groups of people rather than forcing them to explore content from all over. They’re also easy to find. Reddit subreddits and Facebook groups are two common examples of smaller spaces on larger platforms. These groups are designated corners within the larger platform designed to encourage smaller groups of users to post, share and connect. It’s easier to join such spaces when you’re already on the platform – no need to set up a new account.
Discord is a great example of this model. It started as a voice chat service for gamers and has grown into a massive platform with 19 million servers and 150 million monthly active users. According to a Discord spokesperson, 80% of communications on the platform take place in smaller group servers. Discord is not a virtual global town square, but a large-scale platform that allows users to connect more one-on-one by joining specific community servers (such as Manchester City Football Super Fans). Users can also create their own servers for friends and take advantage of group chat features to avoid international text messaging fees and Apple’s blue bubble and Android’s green bubble disaster.
Independent, topic-specific platforms are also becoming increasingly popular. For movie fans, Letterboxd became a hit during the pandemic and has seen its user base grow steadily since then. It currently has 10 million users, up from 4.1 million in 2021 and 1.8 million in 2020, according to the Washington Post. With over 11 million stories, fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) unites a global audience around specific interests, whether it’s rewriting the ending of Game of Thrones or creating new unorthodox stories for other fandoms .
Invite-only apps like Lapse (the number one free app in the Apple App Store for several months in 2023) encourage you to connect with a small group of friends. Even apps like Nextdoor that connect neighbors in the same geographic area are becoming increasingly common. Nextdoor has 88 million neighbors in 330,000 neighborhoods, and more importantly, 75% of users say the platform helps them feel more connected to their communities.
While these apps have many users, these people find smaller ecosystems within the larger whole. On Letterboxd, users connect with smaller groups through favorite movies, leaving reviews or following friends and favorite film critics. On AO3 it’s divided by fandom and categories or story tags, there’s a niche category for everyone. In Lapse and Nextdoor, these spaces are specifically designed for people to connect with the people they already have in their lives.
Why people use small social platforms
There are many reasons why people leave big platforms, one of which is mental health issues. There’s also the impact social media sites have on our productivity and attention spans, and the desire to avoid doomscrolling. There are also many reasons why people join smaller online communities, including the appeal of exclusivity, avoiding advertising, and taking a break from the news cycle. But the main motivation that comes up time and time again is the desire for community.
Initially, platforms like Facebook should Build and host communities. But that’s not the case today.
“A lot of social platforms now really prioritize discovery and entertainment,” says Rachel Karten, social media marketing expert and creator of the Link In Bio newsletter. Cutten explained that focusing on entertainment content helps big platforms keep users engaged and revenue flowing. But people are still “…looking for places where they can find community.”
This is where niche online communities emerge – whether they’re in a small space on a larger platform or in a dedicated smaller space. In these small communities, people are united by shared goals, interests, locations, or other commonalities. In many cases, the people in these rooms also share the same values and beliefs. These set norms in a small space, said Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Because it’s the group that decides what is and isn’t acceptable behavior, not the platform as a whole, it allows the group to share on a deeper level. “These spaces are very valuable for people to explore sensitive topics and find support from different people,” Zuckerman said. Groups can also decide to have stricter community guidelines than a single platform would.
Take, for example, mental health and substance abuse support groups. People in these groups may want everyone in the space to be at least similarly aligned with their views. They may also find smaller spaces less intimidating, especially if the team emphasizes the importance of respect, support, and empathy. This all builds a sense of security that’s hard to find on larger platforms (if it exists at all).
“[People] Deepti Doshi, co-director of New_ Public: a community-driven research lab focused on digital public infrastructure.
In addition to individuals seeking community, these smaller spaces can bring people together on a social level. One example Dorsey gave was how these digital spaces could be a good alternative to traditional news media for distributing local news and information after thousands of local newspapers closed. “Without these local institutions functioning, weaving our [societal] The fabric comes together and we need to reinvent it…the digital space is emerging to fill this gap,” she said.
Small online spaces aren’t perfect
But not all small spaces are healthy. These niche communities are not immune to the problems faced by larger platforms, especially when it comes to creating echo chambers and normalizing potentially dangerous ideas, whether it’s misinformation or conspiracy theories.
The most important thing that attracts people to join small online communities can also make them dangerous. “Their problem is homogeneity – ending up with a lot of people feeling the same, thinking the same. They’re not good at building bridges or sharing ideas across boundaries,” Zuckerman warns.
This is important, especially as election season heats up and social media platforms grow accordingly. Instagram, for example, recently changed settings for all users to automatically limit political content in user feeds. Even if small spaces want to do something similar, they don’t have the broad oversight and technical firepower that larger platforms have.
Zuckerman wrote in an op-ed earlier this year that the concern about small spaces is that they may be too immune to opposing viewpoints or outside scrutiny. When there is no resistance, extreme views—especially political ones—can normalize and pull people down rabbit holes that are difficult to escape.
Dorsey echoed these concerns, noting that these small platforms are not built to help people connect across differences. “If we want to capitalize on the trend of people moving into these small spaces, we need to complement this with a campaign to ensure these small spaces are actually healthy.”
In this battle, the group administrator or moderator will be crucial. Larger platforms have entire teams dedicated to community management and security, but in smaller online spaces these responsibilities fall to one or a few moderators or moderators. In addition to establishing the group’s online infrastructure, creating the group’s community guidelines and monitoring shared content, they are also responsible for resolving disagreements and seeking punishment when users violate the group’s rules. Therefore, Dorsey noted that providing necessary resources and support to those in these roles is one way to keep these small online spaces healthy. Currently, most people in these roles do it on a volunteer basis – meaning they never get paid for their work, time and emotional labor, which can be huge.
What does this mean for the future of social?
Ultimately, it is unlikely that there will be a mass exodus from these large platforms. Even after a turbulent period following Elon Musk’s acquisition of X (formerly Twitter) in 2022, only 18% of U.S. users left the platform a year later, according to Variety. That’s millions of people, but still less than a fifth of all users in the United States.
Instead, what is more likely to happen is that people will continue to seek out and carve out smaller corners of the internet for their friends and find new groups bonded by shared niche interests, whether they are geographically local or organized by a Made up of a small but global community.
As people continue to adopt or migrate to smaller, more community-driven online spaces, we should shift our perspective to consider these spaces to be just as important in our lives as larger platforms, even as their purposes continue to change. As Karten said, TikTok will probably be where things happen, and Discord will be where we talk about things. Both are important to our online social ecosystem.
As Zuckerman said, “If we’re going to legislate these things, it’s really important that we actually understand what we’re legislating. The fact is, just look at social media, all these people are united via Twitter about Elon To Musk, this is not an accurate depiction of what people encounter on social media.
As legal challenges to big platforms like TikTok continue, taking a comprehensive look at our online social lives will certainly help alleviate fears and concerns. If you have other platforms to rely on, you don’t have to worry too much if one disappears. What’s more important is the underlying motivations for people seeking out these small places, and why they aren’t currently finding what they need on Instagram, Twitter, and other big platforms.
“[Main platforms] They’ve kind of lost their way when it comes to community, and a lot of these platforms were really created with community in mind,” Karten said. “So can any of these platforms find their way back? If they don’t, then I think it’s great that we now have alternatives like Discord and Substack to find community.
