Your Internet Doesn't Need to Be Big

I'm on record saying that what's being built at the AT Protocol , and on the AT Protocol, is a very big deal. It's the tech that powers this blog you're reading right now, but also Bluesky, and also a lot of cool things. It can even let us return to a better era when people had websites, as @anna.germnetwork.com persuasively makes the case for in Why websites?

But getting all of that to take off, more than it already has (and it in fact already has taken off a lot, and probably more than you think), is, well, getting people to use it. And it turns out getting people to use it is more challenging than pointing out, even with great enthusiasm and veracity, how cool it is. And part of that challenge is that people tend not to use something until it's successful, or has the appearance of success.

The version of "the appearance of success" the above thread gets at is an interesting one. "It's not big, so I won't use it until it's big" is, most obviously, a recipe, if enough people cook that way, for it never achieving bigness. "You go first. No, you go first" means no one goes first, and so no one goes.

But there's another trap in this thinking, and it's the idea that bigness doesn't just mean that the thing itself is big, but that I might make it big, too. There are plenty of places you might post a video you've made, but none of them but YouTube can claim to have a user with half-a-billion followers. That is pretty big. But it doesn't mean that if you show up on YouTube with your video, you'll get big. In fact, it means you probably won't. Because the big accounts such up all the oxygen.

You can carve out a niche, sure. And maybe even one that, in the scheme of things, pretty big. But not huge. Not anything like MrBeast. He got there before you did, and he claimed it.

But I think one of the reasons people want to camp out, being small on a big platform versus trying out a new platform (or new distributed and open protocol that enables countless platforms off a single account with shared connections and no lock-in) is that ours is an influencer culture, and everyone dreams of being an influencer, and to be an influencer, you need to be big. And the way you know a platform is capable of bigness is seeing it from others using it.

Again, though, this is a trap. You probably won't ever be big. No matter where you make your digital home. This isn't a knock against you (I'm sure your content is great), it's just that basically no one gets big. Certainly not big enough to make a living at it. Still, though, maybe you'll be the exception? So you might as well stick with the place everyone else is, who knows?

This is its own recipe, though, and one for having kind of more bummer of a time online than you otherwise might. The internet is vast. It contains so many weird corners and niches and communities, most of which are small, and many of which will be more fun to be a part of than the big ones. This is Reddit's secret sauce. But the internet is even vaster, and even weirder, than Reddit.

The point is that by not moving to somewhere that might be better for you, healthier or more fun, and doing it because you want to be in the one place everyone else is, you're probably just denying yourself a good deal of digital enjoyment. As I wrote in The Thing About Griping About Bluesky , we don't actually, not most of us, want to live our lives in crowds. We want to live our lives in communities we connect with, that make us feel good, that inspire and reward. Maybe that's the big platforms. Maybe it's not. But if you stick with the former not because it is the best community for you, but because of the ever-on-the-horizon promise of your own bigness, you're not sticking with the big platform for a very good reason.

Also, you could well be making a bad bet. Every big platform was a small platform once. Every big account on that big platform was once a small account. Even MrBeast. And so trying out better, more fun, more rewarding places could also mean getting in on the ground floor, and benefiting as it builds.

So don't get hung up on bigness. Get hung up on finding places online you enjoy, and share them with people you enjoy, and be content—very content—in that.