Discussions about what the way forward for social media may appear like have turn out to be more and more frequent over the past 12 months. Elon Musk’s acquisition — and gutting — of Twitter, a slew of latest social media startups, and Meta’s launch of Threads have made it clear that the following 5 years gained’t appear like the final.
However nobody really is aware of what social media will appear like 5 years from now. Many startups like Mastodon, Bluesky, Spill, and huge legacy gamers like Meta seem to assume that there can be a brand new catch-all platform that can seize folks’s consideration in the way in which that Twitter and Fb did — and are constructing to that finish. However will everybody merely transfer to a platform solely totally different in identify to proceed the identical cycle? I’m not so positive.
At TechCrunch’s Disrupt convention a couple of weeks in the past, I caught up with an investor who focuses on social media startups. We bought to speaking about what them most, they usually mentioned they have been extra excited by area of interest, verticalized entities that focused a selected demographic or a pastime than by startups seeking to construct giant platforms. They assume a platform with a tighter focus could have extra potential as a result of it permits for robust communities to be constructed.
Lex, a social app aimed on the LGBTQIA+ communities, looks as if an ideal instance of this. The startup simply raised a $5.6 million seed spherical and appears to behave as a digitized model of classic lesbian personals, my colleague Harri Weber wrote. Lex permits its customers to seek out associates, roommates or occasions, all rooted within the queer house.
“At three years previous, Lex doesn’t appear like the following Reddit, Tinder or Twitter, though its scope grows as extra people publicly determine as LGBTQIA+,” she wrote.
Startups like Lex make loads of sense. In case you are becoming a member of giant social platforms like Threads or Twitter to discover a particular neighborhood, it’s positively loads simpler to simply be part of a platform that’s already targeted on and curating content material for that neighborhood or curiosity. Why would somebody from a marginalized group scroll by irrelevant content material, hate and bots to seek out their neighborhood when there’s already a devoted house elsewhere?