The first is more social than media. It’s driven by a backlash to performative, status-seeking social media: people want to spend quality time online with close friends and family. This means less Facebook and Instagram and more WhatsApp and Messenger.

Facebook and Twitter represented Social Networking 1.0, where you were expected to be your whole self online; that expectation, though, was like a legacy company using computers to run their analog business model: it may have been more efficient, but it wasn’t at all an optimal use of technology. The entire magic of software is that it is malleable... See more

“the successor to mass social media is emerging not as a single platform, but as a scattering of alleyways, salons, encrypted lounges and federated town squares – those little gardens. Group chats and invite-only circles are where context and connection survive. These are spaces defined less by scale than by shared understanding, where people no... See more