the return to friends only social media
i am the oldest of the Gen-Z. I remember what it was like to use Facebook back in the day. I was too young for MySpace. I remember logging onto Facebook after a day of school to see which of my friends were online. What did they post? What game were they playing? Mobile apps weren't a thing.
Oh and I am old enough to remember I could actually run out of things to see on my feed. You could actually reach the end of your feed. Crazy right? You didn't have a sea of endless content waiting for you at all times.
Corporations hadn't taken over the feed, there were no influencers. No content creators. Maybe I am viewing it through the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia, there are certainly positives to what we have today but the negatives far outweigh them. People are so ready for a new kind of 'social media'. And players are starting to fill up that space. See PI.FYI for example. Even on BearBlog, we have a community here. I visit Bearblog far more frequently than I visit Instagram these days. (I get overstimulated easily and instagram/tiktok is the final boss of overstimulation.)
Most of us have lost confidence in these big tech companies, and there's very litle they can do to win it back. I guess this is my prediction for 2026 and beyond, more and more people are going to move to slower and more tight-knit social media spaces.