Imagine, by way of analogy, that you start a coffee shop. It's a place for the community to hang out, and after a year or two, a nice chunk of the community is, in fact, hanging out there. Your shop's doing well enough that you may need to move into a bigger space. Or open a second space. Perhaps a third.
Coffee's not making you rich, but it's making you and your staff comfortable enough, and the community loves your shop. Or shops. There are other shops in town, some smaller, some bigger. And nationally, there are the even bigger chains. The vast ones that people who don't care as much about good coffee or good community frequent in their communities, and they make the people in charge of them a ton of money. More than you can imagine. And if you wanted, you could buy stock in them and get a bit of that money yourself.
But, again, you're content with the income you've got. And, more importantly, with the community you've got.
Then a report comes out about numbers in the coffee business. And it shows that another chain is growing like crazy, others are shrinking, some shops have only one location, and your two or three stores are hovering right about where they were. Or they could be down a bit in terms of foot traffic. But, again, you're content. You're making enough to pay the bills and pay your staff's bills. And the community who loves your shop, or shops, really loves your coffee and really loves your community.
The thing is, people look at that report and tell you that your business is failing. It's on its way out. Soon no one will be coming to enjoy the coffee or the community. Why? Because, they're sorry to say, your numbers don't point in the right direction. Don't have the right velocity. Direction towards what? Velocity towards what? Why, becoming the next Starbucks. Not even the next Dutch Bros. So you might as well pack it in, because if you don't, sooner or later all those fleeing customers will do it for you.
Now, I suspect most of us would think this is kind of crazy. Your coffee shop is doing great! Again, you're making a comfortable living, and so are your staff. And you've got that—pretty impressive, if you do say so—community of enthusiastic customers who love your shop as much as you do. There's nothing wrong with being an in-the-scheme-of-things small or medium business with no likelihood of becoming Starbucks. Or Dutch Bros.
But if you're not a coffee shop, and instead a digital haunt, a place online where people hang out and chat and enjoy each other's company, it's, well, conventional wisdom that if you're not on track to become the next biggest thing, you're on track to die. And if you're one of those people frequenting this digital hangout, instead of the physical one, then you really ought to be eyeing the door, and finding a way to take your business to whatever in fact does look like it'll be the next Starbucks or Dutch Bros.
And so we can get out from under that "by way of analogy" and talk about Bluesky. Numbers came out, you see, showing that its usership is dipping. Definitely not growing. Meta's Threads, on the other hand, is going gangbusters. Or the numbers Meta's reporting—which are likely to be gamed in all sorts of typical-for-Meta ways—are showing it going gangbusters. So the battle's over, and Threads has won. Or the battle's nearly over and Threads is winning.
But the thing is, this battle doesn't exist. It's a narrative believed by the tech press and by a lot of internet users who don't remember a time before the Big Platforms on the internet, but it makes as little sense when you poke at it as the claim that the local coffee shop is done for because it won't become Starbucks.
Not every coffee shop needs to be Starbucks to be successful. Not every place you hang out online needs to be Facebook or Instagram to be successful. Not even if it's social media shaped. And not just because, as I've argued, your internet can actually be small, and be healthy being small. But because it's actually kind of crazy to think that every digital space must be, or be on its way to being, the One Place Everyone Is. Just like it would be bad if every coffee shop were Starbucks, it would be bad if every digital hangout were A Platform of the One True Platform variety. We needn't all be crammed in the same place, and we needn't be surrounded, in our spaces, by ever more people, growing at an endless clip into the hundreds of millions or billions, for those places to thrive and for us to have every reason in the world to stick with them, enjoy them, make them the centers of our (digital) community.
We'll get a healthier and more thriving internet if we stop thinking in One True Platform terms. And we'll have a whole lot less anxiety if we break the habit of thinking we need to be on the One True Platform. We don't need to buy the narrative. We can instead just enjoy our communities.