Social media is not losing its users suddenly but quietly. Even active users with large networks are experiencing shrinking reach, increasing advertising, and growing political radicalisation on certain platforms.
The Silent Death of Social Media
I once had more than five hundred contacts on Facebook and I moderate two large groups that used to be buzzing with activity. For many years my timeline was a lively place filled with news, everyday moments, small successes, and long discussions. I could rely on seeing what mattered to the people I knew. Today things look very different. Reactions to my own posts have been dropping for years and the groups are becoming increasingly quiet. Posts that once found an audience now disappear without a trace.
I hardly see people in my timeline anymore. The space is filled with advertisements for random consumer goods I do not need and never ordered. Facebook now shows me the rest of the world only in fragments while the advertising formats continue to expand. Social media has changed so much that the platforms no longer fulfil their original purpose. It is barely about communication anymore and far more about a gigantic extraction machine that treats my attention as raw material.
Instagram is not much better. Where photos and personal experiences once appeared, I now see influencers in endless sequences of product placements. The social element has almost completely vanished and with it the motivation to scroll at all. The platform has lost its character and shows me a constant stream of content that has nothing to do with my social environment.
X is a special case. In recent years this platform has gone through a remarkable downward spiral. X is drifting further and further to the right and is giving space to radical voices that once would not have been tolerated. Many serious users are pulling back because they no longer feel safe and because the culture of discussion has essentially imploded. What was once a place for news, debate, and fast information is today a confusing mix of political polarisation, deliberate provocation, and an atmosphere that suffocates any meaningful exchange. This also contributes to the broader decline of social media because it shows how far the platforms have lost their sense of direction.
The only service that currently brings any real enjoyment again is Bluesky. Perhaps it is the manageable size. Perhaps it is the feeling that people there genuinely want to talk to one another. It feels like a place that has not yet been crushed by commercial pressure and forced optimisation. Bluesky recalls the early days of social networks, when you still felt that posts were seen by real people and not by an algorithm bored between two advertising blocks.
The decline of social media is not a sudden rupture. It is a process that has been running quietly in the background for years. Attention, trust, and patience are not unlimited. Platforms that overuse these resources exhaust their own foundations. Social media has moved away from its original purpose and has turned its users into data suppliers. The more obvious this mechanism became, the more the willingness to participate declined.
This shift is surprisingly quiet. No dramatic crash, no spectacular shutdown. It is a collective turning away. People post less, comment less, and consume less. They realise that these spaces no longer offer them anything. The platforms still exist, but they are hollow, and the culture that once shaped them is barely there anymore.
At the same time new digital spaces are emerging. Personal websites, blogs, themed communities, specialised forums, and private servers are becoming more important. These places are smaller but they once again offer real encounters. People are looking for spaces they own instead of platforms that exploit them. They want digital environments not dominated by advertising or political radicalisation. They want conversations that do not drown in algorithmic noise.
This development recalls the early internet, when people chose certain spaces because they made sense and not because an algorithm pushed them there. Yet the roots go even further back. Long before the modern internet entered our daily lives, there were FidoNet and MausNet. These were communities not aimed at maximum reach but at exchange and mutual support. Messages travelled from node to node, and every operator maintained a small piece of infrastructure themselves. You knew exactly which machine hosted which forum, who maintained it, and what rules applied there. It was a network that existed out of conviction rather than commercial logic.
That spirit is returning today. Then as now new structures arise because the old ones are failing. Social media is dying quietly, but its decline makes room for a new and healthier digital ecosystem. A network that may be smaller but that creates closeness again. A network that values personal responsibility instead of algorithmic control. And a network in which people talk to each other because they want to, not because a platform forces them into it.