Social media was a town square, now it's like a collection of neighborhoods
For a long time, social media felt like one big town square.
Now it feels more like a collection of neighborhoods.
People are choosing communities that match how they want to interact. Some have moved to Bluesky. Others stayed on X. Some spend most of their time on LinkedIn, Threads, Mastodon, TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube.
At the same time, AI generated content, bots, and engagement farming have made it harder to tell what's genuine. Follower counts and impressions still matter, but they don't tell the whole story anymore.
I've found myself caring less about "How many people saw this?" and more about questions like:
Who keeps coming back?
Who's actually part of the community?
What conversations are creating real relationships?
It feels like we're moving away from optimizing for scale and back toward optimizing for trust.
Are you seeing this too? What feels different for you about socials in the last few years?
Replies
I have noticed this too. The interesting part is that smaller communities often feel more valuable than huge audiences now. Do you think social platforms will eventually become more community first?
Fedica
@maryam_nafees1 I think both will co-exist but many platform are trying to prioritize communities over global town square
@albattran Yeah, I think that balance makes sense. The global town square is still useful for discovery, but communities are where deeper trust and more meaningful conversations happen. It’ll be interesting to see which platforms can actually balance both well.
The town square definitely still exists but almost seems to be constrained more and more based on how you tailor your algorithm and following. A better characterization of it in my mind may be a loose network.
I somewhat think about it like when you first get to college. There's a huge number of established groups, but you're not necessarily part of one right off the bat. As you get to know more people and find those who share your interests and values, you'll immerse yourself in one or many.
With the questions you propose, they play off each other a little bit. Who's actually part of the community seriously matters if you want to view any engagement as possibly having value rather than just being slop. This also plays into your third question of what conversations are creating real relationships. The value of social media actually being a place to hear valuable thoughts comes from the effort and critical thought that the purveyors of those posts put into them. There will always be some of those accounts or communities that garner attention from far and wide, but hard for me to imagine that it's much different in the real world where the people who you actually listen to are those you've spent time around to vet the validity of their opinions and thought process. Those people who take the loudest voices as gospel are generally disappointed when they find that loud voices are great for attention but not a proxy for valuable insight.
This may also be indicative of the "town square" being a bit of an illusion rather than a reality that ever was. The most pertinent example of where the idea of the town square actually held somewhat was discussing politics, but those who have a depth of understanding go elsewhere to hear any valuable takes and interact with anyone who they view as having good opinions. It's far more pronounced in any other specialized domains be it tech, finance, law, medicine, or even seemingly simpler things like recreation or hobbies. The town square may be where you start but most quickly move away from it. Seems almost like a natural progression of discussion.
Fedica
@reaganauthoryze Google had the right idea 15 years ago with Circles/Plus but as is usual for them they abandoned it
I think AI content is making genuine personality a competitive advantage again. A slightly imperfect post from a real person often feels more valuable than perfectly optimized content.
“Optimizing for trust” really resonates. The challenge is that trust grows slowly, while algorithms still reward quick spikes. How do you balance the two?
Fedica
@maya_boothman I think its trust in terms of authority content in your niche, or trust in quality of the content you post too. If you post something semi-vague or it misses the mark, it could be good stuff, but still doesnt build trust like something that signals to a group "I know you and feel the same experiences like you do". That's where I think subtle trust builds
@jonwesselink That makes a lot of sense. I like the distinction between “good content” and content that makes a specific group feel genuinely understood. It seems like trust is built less by simply proving expertise and more by consistently showing that you understand the audience’s actual experiences. The interesting challenge is that this kind of subtle trust may compound over time, even if it doesn’t always create an immediate spike in engagement.
The only difference for me really is that I'm active on more places, and I have a few more apps installed on my phone. Personally, I really only follow or interact if I think something's interesting, and that's not something that's changed even in the age of multiple active networks or AI.
Also, I think it would be great if someone developed some kind of app that made it possible to see and interact with multiple social networks at once (so I'd only have to open one app instead of several), but I'm pretty sure every single social network except for Mastodon and maybe BlueSky would get really upset at that. :')
Fedica
@jbrio you are so right, juggling apps is the norm now unfortunately!
As for having an app to view and interact with multiple social networks, that does exist on different levels, the challenge is what platforms allow. There are apps that allow publishing and interacting but not viewing. Fedica probably has the widest coverage (14 platforms and counting) also Fedica's inbox works for interacting, but viewing remains a challenge as not many platforms allow you to fetch timelines (because they want to serve you ads on their platform).
There are apps like Openvibe that allow viewing but they are limited to Bluesky and Mastodon. Back in the day it was possible to view timelines for Twitter but now their high fees make it not feasible to view posts and most tools that integrate with X limit it to interaction/publishing.
Super agree.
it seems we're gonna end up "ID verifying" on every app we use, Just to keep using it normally 😶
Dial
the trust over scale shift feels right to me. what changed for me personally is I stopped treating a big following as a signal of anything, since half of it could be bots or people who followed once and never came back. the smaller communities where the same 20-30 people keep showing up and actually reply to each other feel like the only part of social media that still works the way it used to.
Content feels less human. Communities feel manufactured. Conversations have become automated. I feel like social media has, over the years, lost its uniquely human "spark." I've honestly felt a general disinterest in the content I consume, and I know a lot of people do as well, with the internet becoming less organic and more engineered.
The thing people miss is that fragmentation isn't necessarily audiences splitting, but it's the same person running different personas per platform. Same account, different me. Maybe how we operate in real life also?
We are absolutely starting to optimize for trust, especially with the incredibly high degrees of botting on most social media platforms. Trust is now mostly inferred from history. Someone who's (genuinely) argued with me twice over a year reads as real in a way no follower count does.