Gabby Romano is a key contributor to the Facebook group “Bagels Who Discuss,” which brings together people in the Chapel Hill-Durham, North Carolina area. That means Romano is one of the most active members of the private group, sharing posts and commenting on others' posts, providing the advice, recommendations, and support that the group aims to provide. But she hasn't always been active in Facebook groups like Bagels.
Over the past few years, Romano noticed some changes while using other social media platforms, especially Instagram. Comments on creators' posts were becoming meaner, more critical, and more difficult to deal with. She found herself comparing herself to others and brooding, which wasn't good for her mental health.
“We end up in a pointless scrolling spiral that never feels good but is hard to escape,” she said.
That's why Romano deleted the Instagram app. Now she primarily uses Facebook groups, where we connected. She also uses subreddits to find people with similar interests to her, like local food and hiking groups and an “Ask Me Anything” interior design group.
Romano's experience is just one of many examples of how some social media users are migrating to and embracing new, smaller spaces online. As a social media reporter, I've noticed this trend in my own life and work, so I spoke to experts to find out just how big this trend is, how it's manifesting, and whether these smaller spaces are here to stay.
What are small social media platforms?
Small social media groups are exactly what they sound like: online spaces that are meant to bring people together in small groups, rather than forcing you to seek out a wide variety of content. They're also easy to find. Subreddits and Facebook groups are common examples of small spaces on larger platforms. These groups are meant to allow a small number of people to post, share, and connect in a designated corner within a larger platform. It's easier to join such a space if you're already on the platform; you don't need to create a new account.
Discord is a great example of this pattern at work. It started as a voice chat service for gamers, but has evolved into a massive platform with 200 million monthly active users as of May 2024. According to a Discord spokesperson, 80% of communication on the platform happens in small group servers. Rather than a virtual global town square, Discord is a massive platform where users can connect one-on-one by joining specific community servers, such as Manchester City soccer fanatics. Users can also create their own servers for their friends and take advantage of the group chat feature to avoid international texting charges and the confusion of Apple's blue bubble and Android's green bubble.
Independent, topic-specific platforms are also growing in popularity. Among film fans, Letterboxd exploded in popularity during the pandemic and has steadily grown its user base since then. The site now has 10 million users, up from 1.8 million in 2020 and 4.1 million in 2021, according to The Washington Post. Fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) has more than 11 million stories, connecting audiences around a global range of interests, such as rewriting the ending of Game of Thrones or writing new non-canon stories for other fandoms.
Invite-only apps like Lapse, which was the number one free app on the Apple App Store for several months in 2023, encourage people to connect with a small group of friends. Apps like Nextdoor, which connect neighbors living in the same geographic area, are also becoming increasingly popular. Nextdoor has 88 million neighbors in 330,000 neighborhoods, and more importantly, 75% of users report that the platform makes them feel more connected to their community.
These apps have a lot of users, but they're finding smaller ecosystems within a larger whole. On Letterboxd, users connect with smaller groups through their favorite movies, leaving reviews, and following friends and their favorite movie critics. On AO3, they connect through fandoms, categories, and story tags, and there's a niche category for everyone. On Lapse and Nextdoor, these spaces are specifically designed for people to connect with the people already in their lives.
Why people use smaller social platforms
There are many reasons why people leave major platforms — mental health reasons, for example. There's also the impact of social media sites on productivity and focus, and a desire to avoid doomscrolling. There are also many reasons to join smaller online communities — the allure of exclusivity, avoiding ads, and opting out of the news cycle — but the main motivator cited over and over again was the desire for community.
Originally, platforms like Facebook Assumptions It's about building and hosting a community. But that's not the case right now.
“A lot of social platforms are really prioritizing discovery and entertainment right now,” says Rachel Kalten, a social media marketing expert and creator of the Link In Bio newsletter. Focusing on entertainment content helps the big platforms keep users engaged and generate revenue, Kalten explains. But people are still “looking for places to find community.”
That's where niche online communities emerge. Whether they're small spaces on larger platforms or dedicated spaces, these small communities bring people together around a common goal, interest, location, or other commonality. Often, people in these communities also share the same values and beliefs, which shape the norms in the small space, says Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Because the group, rather than a blanket platform, decides what is and isn't acceptable behavior, it allows for a deeper level of sharing within the group. “These spaces can be really useful for exploring sensitive topics and getting support from a range of people,” Zuckerman says. Groups can also decide to have stricter community guidelines than those of individual platforms.
Take a mental health or substance abuse support group, for example. Members of these groups may want to know that everyone there is at least on board with their views, and may feel more comfortable sharing in a smaller space, especially if the group emphasizes respect, support, and compassion. All of this can create a sense of safety and security that may be much harder to find or even nonexistent on larger platforms.
“[People] “People want to be in a place where they can trust the cultural dynamics of the space they're in, but they don't want to be recipients of algorithms,” says Deepti Doshi, co-director of New_Public, a community-led research institute focused on digital public infrastructure.
Beyond individuals seeking community, these small spaces can also connect people on a societal level. One example Doshi gives is that after thousands of local newspapers closed, these digital spaces could be a good alternative to traditional news outlets for local news and information. “Without these local institutions taking on the role of connecting our communities, [societal] “Reinvention is needed to remake the fabric together… digital spaces are 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 that larger platforms face, especially when it comes to creating echo chambers and normalizing potentially dangerous ideas like misinformation and conspiracy theories.
The very thing that draws people to small online communities can also make them dangerous: “The problem with them is homogeneity. You end up with a lot of people who feel the same way and think the same way. They're not good for bridging boundaries and sharing ideas across borders,” Zuckerman warns.
And that matters, especially as election season heats up and social media platforms follow suit. Instagram, for example, recently changed a setting for all its users to automatically limit political content from their feeds. Even if smaller platforms wanted to do something like that, they don't have the extensive oversight or technical muscle of the larger platforms.
The worry about small spaces, Zuckerman wrote in an op-ed earlier this year, is that they can be too insulated from dissent and outside scrutiny. Without backlash, extreme views, especially political ones, can become the norm, drawing people into pitfalls that are hard to escape.
Doshi echoed this concern, noting that these smaller platforms weren't created to help people connect across differences: “If we want to capitalize on this trend of people congregating in these smaller spaces, we need to complement it with a movement to ensure these smaller spaces are actually healthy.”
In this battle, group administrators and moderators are key. Large platforms have teams dedicated to community management and safety, but in smaller online spaces, those responsibilities fall on one or a few administrators or moderators. In addition to setting up the group's online infrastructure, creating the group's community guidelines, and monitoring what's shared, they are also tasked with resolving disagreements and imposing penalties when users break the group's rules. That's why providing the people who take on these roles with the necessary resources and support is one way to keep these smaller online spaces healthy, Doshi points out. Currently, most of the people who take on these roles do so on a volunteer basis, meaning they are not paid for their work, time, and emotional labor, which can be quite a lot.
What does this mean for the future of social?
Ultimately, these big platforms are unlikely to see mass user defections. According to Variety, even after the turmoil of Elon Musk's acquisition of X (formerly Twitter) in 2022, only 18% of U.S. users left the platform a year later. That's millions of people, but still less than a fifth of all U.S. users.
Rather, it's more likely that people will continue to seek out and carve out their own little corners of the Internet for friends, finding new groups united by common niche interests, whether they're geographically local or small but global communities.
As people adopt or move to smaller, community-driven online spaces, we should pivot to view these spaces as just as important in our lives as the larger platforms, even as their purpose evolves. As Kalten put it, TikTok can be a place where things happen, and Discord can be a place to talk about them. Both are important to our online social ecosystem.
“If you're going to legislate these things, it's really important to actually understand what you're legislating,” Zuckerman said. “And the truth is, just looking at social media as people rallying behind Twitter under the control of Elon Musk is not an accurate picture of social media as people actually encounter it.”
This holistic view of our online social lives will no doubt help ease fears and concerns as legal challenges to big platforms like TikTok continue. We won't be so worried about one platform disappearing if we have others to fall back on. More importantly, it will provide an understanding of the underlying motivations behind why people want these smaller spaces, and why they can't currently find what they want on the big platforms like Instagram and Twitter.
“[Main platforms] “We've kind of lost our way when it comes to community, and a lot of these platforms were literally built with community in mind,” Kalten said. “So can these platforms ever come back? If they can't, I think it's great that there are now alternatives for finding community, like Discord and Substack.”
