Nearly everyone I know uses some form of social media—Instagram, Bluesky, X, or LinkedIn(among numerous others of course). We all seem to be inundated with a need for digital connection, and these companies compete to capture as much of our online lives as they can. Each platform is laser-focused on monopolising our attention, whether through a single app or, in Meta’s case, an entire suite. In chasing ubiquity, social-media services have tried to make themselves universally relevant, servicing every niche interest with the same one-size-fits-all framework. The outcome of this strategy is a bland uniformity, where every major platform now touts time-limited “stories” and short-form video as their latest headline features.

So why, exactly, is it beneficial, either for business or for users, to cram all of digital life into a single environment? I personally would argue that it’s not. Admittedly, the social media giants enjoy massive network effects that keep us tethered to their apps, but no single space can genuinely serve the vast landscape of human interests and experiences. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a company could not be in control of all popular social media outlets, but they can’t be bundled into one coherent experience because such a structure impairs our ability to compartmentalise. Take Google for example: instead of one bloated super-app, it offers discrete tools–Gmail, Search, Drive, YouTube–each with a clear purpose and minimal complexity. Complexity is the key limiting factor in product design, and the tolerance for it in social media is far too low to support a single “platform to rule them all”.

This post is ultimately inspired by the increasing success of Beli, a restaurant rating and social networking platform, the growth of which appears to currently be hitting critical mass. This application directly serves a specific and ubiquitous human experience, eating out, and is able to provide specific tools related to this activity without pushing the aforementioned complexity barrier. Instagram, for example, would struggle to implement many of Beli’s features, as it would compromise the elegant simplicity that makes the application so intuitive.

On a more esoteric level, I think that different experiences deserve to have different community characteristics associated with them. Continuing with Instagram as an example, a culture has developed around how users interact with the service itself and their communities within the app, which has become increasingly invariant over the application's lifetime. It’s naive to think that this relatively consistent culture can serve the wide breadth of human experiences. There are, of course, counterexamples such as Reddit, which is highly differentiated between different communities within the app (subreddits), but by and large still provides each individual community with the same generic set of tools to shape their digital space. In this way, total standardisation of social interaction will ultimately be an unsuccessful strategy which only stymies the individual’s ability to engage in self-expression, creating market opportunity around building social networks, made bespoke for some of the activities we value most.