From BBC Future:
More and more people are preaching the gospel of small being better when it comes to online social life. Scale may be one of the issues with the massive social networking sites that now dominate our lives. And for certain Facebook users, the smaller and more secret the groups, the better.
I mean, we use to just call them forums.
Not the massive soapbox parks with a hundred boards, but the small yet open communities that might have even been admined by someone you know personally. Self-selected groups that might traffic in the specific yet members commonly understand the conversation, vie against the same taste hierarchy and eventually morph into a cast of characters. Paradoxically, this is also the place where you can do you in a version — amplifying aspects of your personality, waxing essayistic and generally getting loud at people who ultimately want to listen and shout back. Because if they don’t you’re up for Ye Olde Swyfte Banhammer [1].
If the only social media market you’re in is Real Talk, you’re bound to end up, yet again, in a small forum that has been assigned a nook on the monolith. Public comment threads are a hideous deathmatch — and that includes the entire Twitter. Contrast with WhatsApp groups organizing movement politics, for better or worse. It’s the most natural shift towards the molecular because it builds on what already works and has always been necessary for us social hominids.
I remember looking at everyone’s friend count on Facebook. Fuck that. In the Dunbar model of the solar system, I have just the right amount of satellites:
[1] EDIT: Let me amplify this for you with a quote found in this week’s Sentiers:
[Twitch CEO Emmett] Shear said he saw at Reddit the difference between communities with strong moderation versus ones that didn’t have much moderation at all. […] “The one with good, strong moderation, in many ways, is actually the place with freer speech, because it was actually the place where people could express themselves and not just get destroyed by trolls and abuse and harassment.”
Less is more in Catalonia, too.
the Budafoki amended 