The era of the private social platforms

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have spent a decade-plus years building digital global public, town square-like platforms, 

However already there is a new global trend evolving that will see the next chapter of social media focus on the digital equivalent of the living room.

Many people have probably already started building a private social platform community without even realising they were part of what will be even more important to our lives than our digital town squares and will become over the next few years what Facebook and Twitter have represented in our social circles for the last decade.

More and more people are already relocating to private spaces on messaging apps like Messenger and WhatsApp to discuss news and stay in touch.

Instead of sharing on platforms that let you connect to the whole world at once, private online spaces increasingly house a tight-knit group of friends and families, allowing people to be more themselves in their activities and posts. smaller communities, where people not only feel safer but also are comfortable being themselves rather than the public face on the public global town square.

Those of us old enough to remember when telephones were still only relatively new into our homes having been the thing in the red phone box you had to feed money into as it beeped away mid conversation.

Will remember the public face of the 1980’s as the telephone voice our parents suddenly used when they answered the plastic rotary dial phone sitting on the table in the hall or the window ledge.

Suddenly the voice moved from the everyday one to some posh upper class style and you were left wondering who had just walked into the house and picked up the phone.

The public face of social media is the modern day equivalent of the posh voice that changes who many of us are outside our social circle.

The transition to smaller, tight-knit communities will gained more momentum in 2023 and will see the rise of private social platforms.

Will the impact on society be as dramatic as the global town square is however something that only the future can tell us.