Discussions about what the way forward for social media may appear to be have change into more and more frequent during the last 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 to be the final.
However nobody truly is aware of what social media will appear to be 5 years from now. Many startups like Mastodon, Bluesky, Spill, and huge legacy gamers like Meta seem to suppose that there shall be a brand new catch-all platform that can seize individuals’s consideration in the best way that Twitter and Fb did — and are constructing to that finish. However will everybody merely transfer to a platform solely totally different in title to proceed the identical cycle? I’m not so certain.
At TechCrunch’s Disrupt convention just a few weeks in the past, I caught up with an investor who focuses on social media startups. We acquired to speaking about what them most, they usually stated they have been extra excited by area of interest, verticalized entities that focused a selected demographic or a pastime than by startups trying to construct massive platforms. They suppose a platform with a tighter focus may have extra potential as a result of it permits for sturdy communities to be constructed.
Lex, a social app aimed on the LGBTQIA+ communities, looks like 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 search out mates, roommates or occasions, all rooted within the queer house.
“At three years previous, Lex doesn’t appear to be the following Reddit, Tinder or Twitter, though its scope grows as extra of us publicly determine as LGBTQIA+,” she wrote.
Startups like Lex make numerous sense. If you’re becoming a member of massive social platforms like Threads or Twitter to discover a particular neighborhood, it’s positively rather a lot simpler to only 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 means of irrelevant content material, hate and bots to search out their neighborhood when there’s already a devoted house elsewhere?