Everyone Fled the Feed for the Group Chat.

There's this infographic moving around my networks on LinkedIn this last week.

Email marketers are sending it around with the usual pitch — commit to email, build the relationship, own the list. Fair!

It's a good strategy for traditional media publishers to sit with as they confront the transition from the Platform Era to the Agentic Era.

If you make media or journalism that lives on a website or an app, and you're not entirely sure what those will even look like in 2-5 years, now's the time to build direct.

But it's a great graphic beyond the pitch. It echoes ones I've loved from the past that map where internet users actually spend their time online.

Full 20+ year annotated changes in a youtube video here.

Many of those maps begin in the 'Portal' era of AOl, which, of course gave way to social platforms.

A few years ago, social was bigger. And it's not just that Facebook or Snapchat or TikTok themselves got smaller. Social media is being used less. And as John Burn-Murdoch so brilliantly identified in an October 2025 analysis for the Financial Times that almost presages the Summer of Lud, it's the young people in the vanguard of this moment:

Why did people retreat from feed to inbox and group chat? Because they want to belong, not just scroll.

Those websites and apps were excellent products when they were websites and apps focused on growing their social graphs — feature-rich, demonstrating value, worth staying in the feed for. But by their own communication about their own products, they know DMs are where the energy is now. Snapchat never really left that mode, which has become its own sort of moat — or gilded cage. Adam Mosseri talks regularly about how much of Instagram's activity now lives in DMs and group chats, an insight that was at the center of his 2025 State of Instagram memo from this past December.

As an actual user, it all feels familiar — I've hidden in my DMs and email too.

Building for 'Community'

You can watch this migration show up in the product roadmaps right now, not just the behavior data.

Beehiiv just launched Community — native discussion channels and gated spaces built directly into the platform, explicitly so creators stop "stitching together newsletters, Facebook groups, Discord servers, and membership tools."

Substack's own chat has quietly matured into the same territory — a group-chat-and-live-hangout space that never touches the main feed.

Patreon has announced new features for it's existing community product as it expanded it's pitch to creator journalists.

Meanwhile creators didn't wait for the platforms to catch up: Instagram Stories and WhatsApp broadcast channels have been the working-class version of this for a couple of years now, a way to talk to your most loyal few hundred people without performing for the timeline. Everyone from Kardashian-scaled influencers to local what-to-do-around-town Instagrammers draws from that same playbook.

Creators or Creator-economy shaped companies. Different markets and scales. But for multiple years now, the instinct is the same: build a room off to the side where the real relationship happens, and let the feed be the billboard out front.

I know which Slacks I hang out in during certain seasons. I know which group chats get a reply within the hour, and which ones are just where good intentions go to die a slow, read-receipted death. That's the terrain worth charting — not the platforms people fled, but the rooms they fled into, and increasingly the IRL spaces people are using technology just to stay coordinated on.

I've recently had to revisit checking Facebook on my phone, because my Wednesday night ball hockey rec league only posts schedule changes in a private group there.

We know people have retreated to the inbox and the group chat. We feel it. We're starting to see it in the data, and now in the product launches too.

For sure, businesses operating through this transition should follow users there. But zoom out. If everyone is optimizing and marketing to those channels, all at once, all quietly, at the same time …

Can you Future-Proof with this Uncertain Terrain?

I'm already sensing what's happening next. A few months ago, I happily started using Gemini to sort through my inbox. That trend is just starting. It's not hard to imagine a world where even the inbox and the group-chat folders get intermediated too. Retreating from feed to inbox doesn't get you out of the coordination problem — it just moves the problem somewhere quieter, and eventually somewhere else will need sorting too.

That is certainly to be a part of tomorrow's problem. But what can you do today?

A map — like the box chart atop this post — would show you each of these as islands in the stream. When Alexis Madrigal wrote about social feeds swallowing the wider, open internet - way back in 2013!! -- that's the word he used: Stream. What's missing is something with more texture than that — an atlas. Not just where the rooms are, but how they relate to each other: who's in more than one, which ones actually talk to each other.

Ben Werdmuller, one of the sharper open-internet thinkers around, has a phrase for what this is might become — an 'archipelago of trust.' He sketched it as a framework for how decentralized technology could actually reflect the way humans organize themselves, rather than the other way around.

My ball hockey league found its island. So did my group chats, my Slacks, my half-automated inbox. The archipelagos are forming below the surface whether anyone maps them or not. The biggest, most valuable question becomes .. who is building the ferry? What combination of technology company, creator/convener/community and each of us as individuals?

Still, I don't know. But I'm enjoying trying to find out — building an Atlas that charts where the journalism archipelagos are forming.