We Will Never Have a Home On Social Media

Almost every social media app has a button in its toolbar to get back to the main feed: "Go Home."

But with all the recent changes, something's become clear in the past few years: we don't have a home on social media. We never did.

The impending TikTok ban underscores this: No matter what role these different platforms and services play in our lives, none of them really exist for us.

The other day at Walgreens, I overheard two young clerks discussing the ban:

"Ugh I'm like so sad now. I worked 5 years on my TikTok algorithm"

"I'm just going to use Instagram reels"

"My Instagram reels aren't that good"

This conversation captures the mood of social media in America right now. We're all essentially squatters on the internet. We might join a network and like the vibe, spend our time and energy there... and then something changes. A home is a place where we have some control over what happens... Not here.

This is also one of the first times we’ve had our media limited by our geography (except if your a pro sports fan -- media blackouts). Think about how media consumption used to be defined by geography: however far radio waves could travel, TV signals could reach, or newspaper delivery trucks could drive. That physical limitation created a kind of home – you knew your local stations, your local paper.

Today, geography is mostly eliminated from the equation: put me anywhere in the world with an internet connection, and my media consumption remains the same.

We're entering a new phase of digital and social media fragmentation. There’s no one place where everyone hangs out. And the more networks come, more fragmentation happens.

We've seen shifts at almost every major network: API changes at Reddit, Twitter's metamorphosis into X, and Meta's elimination of fact-checking at Facebook and Instagram. Each of these changes have affected people differently: some made noise and left, others grumbled and moved on, and most just continued scrolling.

The platforms themselves follow a predictable pattern: either they get so large they replace their original mission with a quest for profits, or they stay too small to sustain themselves.

The owners don't really care, and frankly, they shouldn't – they're running businesses, not charities. They never have to look us in the eyes. They're often dealing in hypotheticals and formulas, setting policies from a distance.

All of this reminds me of that old spiritual:

This world is not my home, I'm just a-passing through, My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue; The angels beckon me from heaven's open door, And I can't feel at home in this world anymore.

Maybe that's the point. Are we really supposed to feel at home on any of these digital platforms? What is a home anyway? What is a network without its users? These questions that "people of the internet" have discussed academically for decades are now entering the mainstream.

There's no such thing as a permanent digital home – the closest thing we have to it are our e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Just as our physical world is in constant flux, our digital spaces will continue to evolve, fragment, and sometimes disappear entirely. While so much of the internet is built on information existing "forever," there is a temporariness to it all that many of us are just realizing. We should embrace this and understanding that our online communities, like our offline ones ultimately are, are always be in a state of change. Post broad and wide – but you’ll never be home.