The Last Days of Mass Social Media

Right now is the perfect time to build human-scale communities

Sunrise in Copenhagen. Emergent and slightly out of focus.

Early in the pandemic, I started a weekly call for community leaders. Monday mornings. No agenda. Just friends and acquaintances in the industry trying to figure out how to keep ourselves sane and keep our communities connected while everything in the real world shut down.

What became apparent in the early days of the pandemic lockdown was how thin our existing tools were. Forums felt static and one-dimensional. Social feeds felt noisy and hollow. People weren’t looking for more content. They were looking for presence. Real conversation. A sense that someone else was actually there, in that shared moment in time.

The pandemic didn’t so much break social media as deeply expose its flaws.

The original promise of social media was a big tent where everyone was welcome.

Instead, the mass social platforms became very good at capturing attention and very bad at supporting human connection. The reality of mass social media is a marketplace of attention, behavior, and data, and the clear winners are the platform providers that harvest and monetize the marketplace.

Mass social media had trained us to confuse activity with connection. Scrolling replaced conversations and connection. What we experienced was a facsimile of real life, as algorithms shaped our experiences. In effect, through social media platforms, we were each in a community of one.

Cut to December 2025: How is all this working out?

While most people with an Internet connection also use social media, the primary activity is consumption. Participation and engagement are evaporating.

• Facebook maintains 3.07 billion monthly active users, (CNBC) yet average page engagement sits at a dismal 0.06%. Instagram’s 2-3 billion users (Electro IQ) generate only 0.36-0.50% engagement—a 28% year-over-year decline. (Socialinsider) Twitter/X presents the starkest case: engagement rates have collapsed to 0.029% across industries (SocialSellinator), with users posting 38% less frequently than in 2023 (TECHSABADO) and daily active users falling from 250 million to 157 million under Musk’s ownership. Epic Owl

• TikTok remains the outlier with 2.5% engagement rates (Electro IQ) and 58-95 minutes of daily usage—yet even this platform shows a decline from its 5.14% peak. (Social Media Today) LinkedIn has bucked the trend entirely, with engagement climbing from 6% to 8.01% (Buffer) as professionals migrate serious discourse away from deteriorating platforms. But even LinkedIn isn’t immune from controversy, as recent changes have signifigantly negatively impacted organic reach for most contributors.

• Time spent tells a more nuanced story than user counts suggest. Global social media consumption has dropped approximately 10% since 2022, now averaging 2 hours 20 minutes daily. (RTÉ) More critically, the nature of that time has shifted: 68-78% of social media activity is now passive scrolling rather than active engagement. (Powertechjournal) Users maintain accounts but have stopped posting—a phenomenon researchers call “lurking” that represents the worst outcome for platforms dependent on user-generated content.

Gen AI hasn’t helped the quality of content and engagement on mass social platforms, as synthetic profiles shovel AI-generated text, audio, and video into feeds.

You can see the fallout in how people talk about social media now. Breaks are framed as recovery. Scrolling is described as a habit (doom scrolling), not a pleasure. Posting feels risky, while silence feels safer.

The open and authentic contributions aren’t slowing down because people are “disengaged”; it is because they are exhausted from being part of the social media machine.

The time is right to rethink community at the human scale

The collapse of mass social engagement is a correction. For two decades, we operated under the assumption that bigger was better, that scale was the ultimate metric of success, that the global village could contain meaningful connections among billions. That assumption was always suspect. Now we have the data to prove it.

Here’s what the numbers tell us: while mass platforms struggle to crack 1% engagement, private communities routinely achieve 40% monthly engagement rates. Discord’s own research shows that 90% of private servers have fewer than 15 members, and servers with 50-100 members achieve 78% engagement. The platforms built for mass scale are being used for intimate connections. Users are telling us something.

The research on optimal community size has been remarkably consistent for decades. Robin Dunbar’s work on cognitive limits suggests we can maintain meaningful relationships with roughly 150 people, and that’s the outer edge. Our circle of close relationships tops out around 15. This is a feature of human cognition to embrace. Communities can build around this limit rather than fighting it.

What we’re witnessing is a migration already in progress. Eighty-four percent of online sharing now happens through “dark social” channels: private messages, group chats, curated spaces invisible to the algorithmic eye. People haven’t stopped connecting. They’ve stopped connecting in public, on platforms that monetize their attention and weaponize their data.

From audiences to relationships: The strategic pivot

In 2018, I developed a framework for understanding how community strategy evolves within organizations. Most companies start with what I called “function-centered strategy,” where community serves as a support deflection mechanism, measured in tickets avoided. Some progress to “experience-centered strategy,” where community supports discrete customer touchpoints, generating leads and user-generated content. A few reach Essential Community, a “relationship-centered strategy,” where community becomes the medium for nurturing connections throughout the customer lifecycle.

The next shift, the one that’s now both possible and necessary, is toward what I called “transformational strategy.” This is where the network of relationships catalyzes a transformation of the business itself. Community becomes the dominant expression of brand, core to the product offering, and expected by customers.

Seven years later, the case for this transformation has only strengthened. Consider what’s changed:

• First-party relationships have become first-party data. Third-party cookies are dying, and privacy regulations are tightening. The organizations with direct, trusted relationships with their customers hold an increasingly valuable asset. A curated community is both an engagement channel and a proprietary intelligence layer.

• Customers seek more than products. They seek purpose and belonging. The research is consistent: people join communities for information but stay for identity. They want to be part of something, to contribute to something, to matter to someone. Mass platforms weren’t designed to deliver this.

• AI is commoditizing content. Every organization can now generate infinite content. What they can’t generate is trust, relationship, context, and history. The value is shifting from what you publish to who you know and how well you know them.

Successful communities operate on the economics of relationships, not attention. The value compounds over time rather than decaying with each algorithmic update. Members contribute because they're invested, not because they're being manipulated. Trust accumulates. Context deepens. The longer someone participates, the more valuable their participation becomes, to them and to the community.

Building the case for investment

If you’re reading this and thinking about how to make this case within your organization, here’s the argument in its simplest form:

The public platforms where you’ve been investing are declining. Engagement metrics are collapsing, and so is fundamental value. You’re paying more to reach fewer people who trust you less. The algorithmic advantage has shifted entirely to the platform, not the brand.

Meanwhile, owned community infrastructure, where you control the experience, own the relationships, and compound value over time, has never been more accessible or more necessary.

The question is whether you’ll make this shift proactively or reactively, whether you’ll build your community before or after your competitors build theirs.

What this looks like in practice

The transition from mass social investment to curated community investment requires shifting the strategic center of gravity.

• Start with purpose. Before you choose technology, get clear on why people would want to be in a relationship with you and each other. What transformation are you enabling? What is the larger whole that you are encouraging members to belong to? What problems are you solving together that can’t be solved alone?

• Think relationships. Stop counting followers and start understanding the actual network of connections among your customers, partners, and stakeholders. Who knows whom? Where does value flow? Where is there latent relationship potential you’re not activating?

• Design for the human scale. Use Dunbar’s Number as a design principle. Create structures that enable intimacy within larger communities: cohorts, circles, pods, chapters. Let people find their 15 within your 1,500.

• Invest in qualification over growth. The value of a community is determined by who’s in it, not how many. A vetted, qualified community of 500 engaged members will outperform a mass audience of 50,000 passive followers every time.

• Relational measurements over time. Move beyond reach and impressions to relationship metrics: trust, reciprocity, contribution quality, network density, and member lifetime value. The metrics of mass social don’t transfer to relationship infrastructure.

The last days and the first days

We’re living through a transition that will seem obvious in retrospect. Mass social media functioned brilliantly as an attention and data extraction mechanism. It has failed as a model for human connection.

What we needed, what we’ve always needed, is what we had in those Monday morning calls during the pandemic. Presence. Real conversation. The sense that someone else was actually there.

The last days of mass social media will also (hopefully) be the first days of something more human: smaller spaces, slower conversations, deeper trust, and a conscious choice to build digital infrastructure that serves human connection rather than exploiting it.

The tools exist. The economic case is clear. The migration is already happening. The only question is whether you’ll be building the communities people are moving toward, or watching from the platforms they’re leaving behind.

And lastly, know that we still have power as individuals and leaders.

As Howard Rheingold originally said about early communities, like The WELL:
”What it is, is up to us.”