I think a persuasive argument can be made that enough people are so infuriated by the state of big social media that a change is beginning. As I see it, part of that change is a migration away from the big social media sites that companies have created for profit to the smaller ones that have been created by people for people. I am not saying big social media will be abandoned completely, just that enough people will be leaving to make small social media a tempting alternative for many who are looking for something better.

The Problems with Big Social Media

Big social media is no longer about meeting people, having interesting conversations, and making new online friends. In Cat Valente's 2022 article, Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media, she points out that from the very beginning of large corporate-run social media in the early 1990's, the giants have been doing their best to replace community-centric social networks (people talking to each other) with platforms for selling products. Last month during Meta's antitrust trial, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his company's focus has changed radically from where it began,

The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in 'the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.' This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the 'percent of time spent viewing content posted by "friends" ' has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.

Zuckerberg's testimony implies that Facebook (Meta) may no longer be as much of an option if we actually want to talk to each other on line. But, neither are many of the other large social media sites. One redditor said about the above article in the New Yorker, "What they are saying is that [Facebook] pretty much only peddle ads and propaganda nowadays, like everybody else does, so they’re not a monopoly as all ‘social media’ is only engaged in sh**ting in people['s] brains and that does not apply to Facebook alone but all of their competing platforms." Even sites like Reddit are changing, resorting to "firing" volunteer moderators and those who run subreddits, banning users, and selling API access to increase revenues--earning significant levels of hate from their users in the process. Another redditor wrote, "Reddit used to be a place with a variety of opinions where the majority would upvote the most agreed upon post. At one time it seemed like the last true glance into how society truly felt. Now all forums have an agenda and if your post doesn’t align to it and agree with all the bots then it’s removed. Reddit is now no different than any other propaganda machine." Also, with millions of users still on Reddit, for the time being, one is unlikely to come across the same user frequently enough to get to know him unless he is on one of the smaller subreddits. So, Reddit may not be as useful to many users as it once was for making online friends.

Is it now fair to say that social media on the largest corporate sites is nearly dead? Personally, I have noticed that when I search for anything on YouTube, my search queries are to a large extent ignored. Instead, I am shown mostly the same videos over and over. Have the people in control finally managed to convince us to stop talking to each other by refusing to show us the posts of people we want to see and instead showing us whatever the people in charge want us to see? Or, has socializing on large corporate-controlled social media diminished so much simply because many users have moved to other platforms where they can much more easily talk to each other again? One Blue Dwarf user commented recently, "'Social media' as embodied by greedy corporations, and Facebook in particular, can go die anytime. People will keep talking to each other, preferably without the advertising and surveillance." Another user followed that comment with, "It can't happen soon enough." Blue Dwarf is a small social media site that I started three years ago, in part because I wanted a place to post links to cheapskatesguide articles without worrying that moderators would hide them or ban me for posting them.

The problem is that the corporate-controlled Web is little more than a thinly-veiled advertising machine. Corporate search engines no longer show us certain content we want to see, advertisers try to limit free speech on social media, and corporate social media often bans those who consistently post links to websites that companies consider to be their competitors, which these days may include any website on the small Internet (the Internet built for people by people). Corporate social media justifies removing or de-emphasizing links to small websites and banning users who consistently post them (a practice with which I have personal experience) by labeling them as "blog spam". After all, if companies allowed us to discover great new small blogs and small social media sites, many of us would decide to spend more time there. Then, companies would be less able to advertise to us on their own sites.

Corporate websites and search engines refusing to show us links that could possibly lead to sites created by individuals greatly increases the difficulty of finding other people to interact with on line. I spent years looking for a social media site where I could speak freely to interesting people about interesting topics without interference from gatekeepers, influencers, advertisers, or over-zealous moderators, but I failed to find such a place on the Web. For many, the the best way of remotely contacting people they know in real life is probably text messaging. But what about those who for whatever reason don't use their cellphones for text messaging, who have found the harassment in their particular group of acquaintances to be too much, or who may have been ostracized from their local group? What about those who find they aren't meeting many people in real life who they want to talk to? For some, the answer might be gaming sites. Others may be using Discord or other chat apps. But let's face it, the 1990's and early 2000's type of social media that allowed individuals who may never have met in real life to talk to each other conveniently in non-real time still has value, even if the giant sites are not interested (or were never interested) in facilitating that type of personal interaction.

Why Small, Individually-Run Social Media may be Making a Comeback

I believe that for a number of reasons, including the obvious problems associated with big social media, small social media has been set up for a significant comeback. The reader is free to disagree with me, because we have been told by the mainstream media for well over a decade that small social media is dead. They say the same about small blogs, yet small blogs are actually more plentiful than ever, with over 600 million blogs on the Internet and about 7 million new blog articles published each day. The media is wrong about the death of blogging, and they are wrong about the death of small social media.

As I see it, a large part of the value of early online social media was that random strangers could connect with each other from anywhere on the planet, perhaps engage in stimulating conversations, perhaps learn different perspectives, maybe even over time become friends. People still want that today, but is it still available?

No one seems to know how many social media sites exist, or if anyone does, they aren't saying. Trying to answer that question via a Google or Bing search yields nothing more than information about the 20 or so largest social media sites. Wikipedia is a bit more helpful. It maintains a list of "notable" active sites, in which I counted 247, but the vast majority of social media sites on the Web are not "notable" enough to be included in the list. The Big List of Small Forums is a website that allows visitors to post their favorite small social media sites where everyone can see them. To give readers an idea of how many small social media sites are NOT on Wikipedia's list, of the 101 sites currently listed on The Big List, only two are also on Wikipedia's list. This suggests to me that something like 12,000 social media sites may exist on the Web, and those are just the publicly-accessible ones. Obviously, that number is only a very rough guess, but the reasoning process behind it suggests many, many more social media sites exist than can be found from casual Internet searches. Millions of people still want to belong to online communities that make them feel welcome and engaged, and I suspect the main reason many are not involved with such places is only that they have not yet found them.

Fortunately for many of those who are still looking, some notable social media trends have been reported recently by the mainstream media. One of the most visible success stories of the past three years has been the Fediverse. I am no fan of the micro-blogging format, preferring the option of longer posts, but I have to admit that the growth of Mastodon to over 2.5 million monthly active users has been unprecedented for a decentralized network. And, the Fediverse's success extends beyond just Mastodon. According to Wikipedia, Lemmy had 66,000 monthly active users about two years ago. Unfortunately, I could not find more recent statistics, but I have noticed a large increase in Lemmy traffic to my website over the past couple of years.

Doubtless, the Fediverse's success is due in large part to the fact that anyone with a moderate degree of technical knowledge can install software on a server to set up his own "instance" for talking to anyone he wants about anything he wants. He can also run his instance as he pleases, completely bypassing the usual corporate gatekeepers who are wholly fixated on pushing advertisements and sucking up users' data.

Many past barriers to individuals setting up their own small social media sites are being lowered. About a year ago, I made a list of 18 free and open source forum programs. Choosing one of them to create a new site would be ideal for maximum freedom at a minimum cost to the operator. Also, for anyone in the United States who cannot afford or may not want to rent a server from a web-hosting company, running a small social media site inexpensively on a home server is now easier than ever, thanks to the significantly larger upload bandwidths that many US Internet consumers have seen over the past 10 years. I assume consumers in many other countries around the world are in similar circumstances. For those who are less technically savvy but can afford to pay $5 to $20 a month for a small Mastodon instance, turn-key installations of Mastodon are increasingly being offered by web-hosting services.

Rather unfortunately, many companies now offer to perform the technical work of keeping a site running in exchange for all of the rights to an online community's users and content. Anyone can now become an unpaid employee without even realizing it. All you have to do is "set up a server" on Discord or create a new forum on any of the servers of several companies that will happily advertise to you and the rest of your forum's captive users. Perhaps, these companies will even take over and kick you off of your own forum after it grows large enough to be financially worth their while. As mentioned in an article linked to above, Reddit moderators who created their own subreddits recently learned this when Reddit decided to take over the communities the creators had worked so hard to build into something worth stealing (legally of course). If you decide to create your own forum, do yourself a favor. Don't do something stupid that makes it vulnerable to corporate confiscation. The way to protect yourself and your users is by running your social media site at a domain that you own and on a server that you control, and don't agree to hand over any of your rights to anyone for any reason.

Create Your Own Small Social media Site

For those who have been interested enough to read to the end of this article, I would like to make a call to arms of sorts. I believe large corporate-run social media sites are vulnerable in a way they have not been for twenty years. Their users have reached a state of extreme dissatisfaction with their "enshittified" platforms, and they are looking for something, anything, better. For proof of that, just look at the growth of the Fediverse, Blue Sky, and Threads. Visit the Reddit Alternatives subreddit, and read their angry words that border on hatred for their current platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Steve Huffman, and the rest of the CEO's of the major platforms no longer care, because they believe they have won the battle. They think their users have no viable alternatives, so they are free to crank up the advertising to eleven and do whatever they like inside their walled gardens, because the Internet cattle they have pinned inside either can't or are too dumb to leave. This is why some of us are now forced to sit through an advertisement literally every five minutes on YouTube. This is why we are only shown posts and videos by influencers who are the big money producers for the platforms. This is why we are having great difficulty following our friends, if we still can. But each of you who are reading these words can help end this situation by creating your own small social media site.

All you need to start your own small site is a domain name, a server that you can buy, rent, or set up on an old computer, perhaps social media software (see above), patience, a willingness to work, and ideas for ways of notifying potential users of the existence of your site. I know the last one is the most difficult of all, but many of you may have ideas I have never considered. So, find methods that work for you, and then run your own site where you and the other people on it will be free of the advertisements, the bans, the lack of free speech, the arbitrary rules by condescending CEO's who care about nothing but making money, and all the rest that you have endured in big tech's walled-gardens. Run your new site as you and your users see fit, and make it far superior to Facebook, Twitter (X), Reddit, or any of the other major sites whose owners think you have no other options.

One of the many benefits of running Blue Dwarf is that I can point to an operational social media site that I have created myself (with much help from the other users, of course) that that has no advertisements, is all about people talking to each other, runs quickly on trivial hardware with a pitifully small upload bandwidth, and I can say, "See! If I can do this, you can too." Blue Dwarf proves that if you want to talk to people and make new friends online, you can. If you want free speech, you can have it. If you don't want to hand over your data or ever see another advertisement, you don't have to. So, I encourage you to visit Blue Dwarf (and/or other small social media sites) and read some of the posts, read the rules of conduct, and read the FAQ posts. Notice the absence of advertising. Notice the way users talk to each other. Notice the site's usability and unique features. Get a feel for the place, and then go and duplicate it. Or, make something uniquely your own that is even better.

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