Warning: this post refers to the bad things that happen on the internet; wide variety of topics, be careful!
The internet is fragmenting...
I feel like the internet's become less centralised, of late.
It used to be the case that pretty much everyone who had an online prescence would be on either Facebook or Twitter.
Sure, people might have other socials as well, but you could more-or-less guarantee that most people who used social media at all would also be actively using at least one of those two.
Now? Well… *stares at abyss of dumpster fires*
Things are more fractured.
While Facebook and Twitter (yes, Elon, Twitter,) are still big contenders, they're no longer places where you know everyone will be hanging out, digital-wise.
Instead, people are scattered - a few here, a few there.
A little bit like they used to be, way back when, before the social media empires. In the days of message boards and niche forums.
To me (and I may be wrong, of course,) it looks like we're headed more and more towards that chatroom-style web diaspora, where the net-bubbles were a lot smaller, but you might be in more of them.
Social media is splintering.
Is it a good thing? I don't know.
I wasn't old enough to be on ye oldey-fashioned forums and chatrooms - during that era I was probably still playing on the CBBC and Nickolodeon websites; they had cool games, don't judge me.
I was just a kid in those early days of life online, when the computer still made bleep-bloop-screech noises in order to connect to the web, and you couldn't use the telephone (a landline,) at the same time.
So I'm not sure whether a return to the scatter-gun of socials, where online communities were comparatively tiny and niche, would be a good thing or a bad thing.
I'm pretty sure that those old-school pre-socials were never as 'safe' as people now seem to think they were
- rose-coloured glasses for the days before big tech, maybe? Because I distinctly remember being warned of the dangers of those chatrooms and forums when I was little.
Strangers on the internet were the ultimate millennial bogeyman, and it's only when things like MySpace and Beebo came along that we started to get brave enough to actually, y'know, talk to strangers on the internet.
Even if maybe we shouldn't have.
Of course, all of those assemblies and pamphlets about the dangers of meeting strangers online were summarily ignored by many of my teenage classmates, who went on to do all the things they tell you not to. Because teenagers.
Remember MySpace and Beebo?
I didn't have them, but some of my friends would use them to post age-inappropriate photos of themselves, and talk to creepy older men.
Or bully people.
Or troll strangers.
Or fall into extremist rabbit-holes.
Or get into pro-self-harm or pro-anorexia content.
None of this stuff is new, no matter what the mainstream press and multiple governments seem to think.
It's all the same sh** that was happening in the noughties and early tens.
It's just more blatant now, whereas before it was hidden amongst the general population's uncertainty of all things tech, and the anonymity of the murky corners of the web - and trust me, teenagers will always find the murky corners of the web.
So - is that better or worse?
Should we be hoping for a return to a small, intense, often intimate, scattering of social profiles and walls, where any abuse was only observed by a handful of other users?
Or should we be glad that we can now at least see the harm being done - even if the scale of that harm is much larger?
And who's to say that any reversion to a scattered-socials model would truly return us to the 90s/00s online social landscape?
Wouldn't it be more likely that we'd just... take the worst of both models - the scale of the 20s and the behind-closed-doors harms of the 00s - and make something that is even more of a digital cesspit than what we have now?
Are we headed towards an internet that's typified by 4chan? Because I think we can all agree that that would be a toxic mess.
...More of a toxic mess, anyway.
I don't know - I'm far from being a tech guru, and even further from being a social media mogul.
Maybe everything will be alright, and big tech will finally get its act together.
Maybe.
But I think, given the cesspits, Capitalists, and hellsites we're currently witnessing in real time - it's a big ask.
But the answer starts with realising that, despite the relative newness of the internet, these problems have existed for what amounts to aeons in internet-time (...which is 10-30 years in calendar time, depending on which specific problem we're talking about.)
These are not issues that sprang into being with Andrew Tate and Elon Musk. They didn't even start with Mark Zuckerberg.
This fire's been burning for a while, it's just that a lot of people - especially those who are older than my fellow younger-millennials - have only just noticed the stink of burning trash.
(Maybe it took a while for the smell to reach them, while those of us in the digital trenches are used to it by now.)
I don't know what to do about the ills of social media - of the internet in general - but politicians and media-type people who seem to think that this is a new problem are simply showing how out-of-touch they are.
The next Nerd Church post is on 3rd August 2025 - see you there!
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