The Current Problem for Online Communities
“Where are you posting now?”“Did you join Bluesky?
“Are you going to download RedNote?”
In the past two weeks, I don’t think I have gone a day without the topic of online communities and/or the current state of social media being brought up. I’ve had conversations with people who have built online communities, and those who just enjoy being a part of them; in both cases, they’re seeing their homes be turned upside down.
I started engaging as part of online communities in 2012. I was an active member within Nerdfighteria and Micro Marching League. At the time, the majority of Nerdfighteria was found on Tumblr, while Micro Marching League was most active on the site’s self-hosted forums. In both cases, there was a home, a central hub for community members of old and new to engage. Now, largely in-part due to the oversaturation of social media platforms and the fatigue we are feeling from it, it’s hard to know where online communities are calling home nowadays.
For online community members, this can be hard to know where to begin engaging with others. Reddit remains to be the leader in online forums, seeing the most consistent userbase growth over a large period of time compared to other social platforms. Some communities are turning to Discord, though this is slightly gatekept, not having a public place to explore. For Nerdfighteria, I have long since exited Tumblr and don’t engage with the community nearly as much as I used to, excluding the occasional comment section under a Vlogbrothers episode. Micro Marching League’s forum is a shell of what it once was, but the community is attempting to rebuild themselves in a community-run Discord server.
For those who have started online communities, they are facing record-number departures and dwindling engagement as many leave for other platforms or are too fatigued to remain active members. I’m part of two nonprofits with engaged online communities. The first exists on Slack, and a community that once had 20,000+ members, now sees an average of two posts/day. The other also used Slack, but after their 60-member community became nearly silent, they attempted to start a Discord server to bring in new members; a move that has yet to see promising results.
These are not isolated incidents—people don’t know where to post and engage with others. I hear the same questions over and over: “Have you left Twitter, yet?” “Did you move to Bluesky?” “How about Mastodon?” “Oh, you’re sticking with Instagram?” “You deleted your Facebook entirely?” “I want to delete my social media but don’t want to abandon all the content I’ve made over the years.”
I’ve made the move to blogging and reading RSS feeds. I did this because a) I have social media fatigue from joining and testing a number of social media platforms over the past six months, b) I want control over the content I put out, and there’s no better way than hosting it on a personal website, c) RSS feeds prevent me from wasting hours on an infinite scroll and d) I’ve surprisingly found a stronger community through this approach than I have the past few years on social media. It started when I came across Manu’s People and Blogs series. This series led me down a rabbit hole of other bloggers, getting a taste of their work and then adding my favorites to an RSS feed. I’ve been able to engage with people on their personal websites and people have been able to find me through mine.
There was a time in internet history when blogs and message boards were king for online communities, but after social media’s 20-year grasp on trying to provide us homes for content and conversation, it’s hard to remember the alternative—a more simplistic, genuine approach to meeting others online. Maybe it’s time we all pause on searching for a new home for our communities, and instead work on building our own.