Online Niche Communities

something I try to keep in mind when writing about online communities is that they’re (usually) filled with real, complex people. They’re not just weird introverts or shut-ins or people trying to escape reality.

For every new subway ad featuring an online pharmacy and a nice monstera plant, there was a new pop-up skate shop soaking up the runoff of Supreme teens. HSWLD on Delancey, a dozen others lost to memory… Online, I browsed IJJI and v.soon and Anti-Social Social Club on my friend’s Tiny Clothing Stores Are.na channel, this selection a mere trickle of

As a consumer, you subscribe to one vision or another: what’s your version of hiking out doors? What type of vibe are you about? Purist? Gorpy? High intensity? Meditative? But in all cases, the branded subculture itself is the main thing, while the role of physical goods is diminished. Their job is not to drive value, but to add another layer of de

all of today’s so-called subcultures are being routed along the same paths, like a Waze-induced traffic jam clogging the streets of a quiet subdivision

One major benefit of subcultures is that they open up necessary space when the mainstream becomes too crowded. Now, thanks to the internet, everything is supposedly a subculture—the mainstream has supposedly broken into a thousand fragments. One would assume this creates more room for everyone to spread out, literally and figuratively, but even tha

what Yancey Strickler calls  Dark Forests . According to him these are “spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments”.

both terms describe communities that withdraw themselves from participation in the power laws of social platforms. According to New Models’ Carly Busta, and Joshua Citarella, it is through this withdrawal that these new subcultures find the space to develop shared interests and build their collective lore.

Where Dark Forests are characterised by their intentional withdrawal from social media, the Cozyweb is non-indexable because of a lacking interconnection between material, creating unintentionally disconnected islands populated by isolated communities.