April 8, 2026
What if the future of social media isn’t a few giant platforms to rule them all, but a mosaic of connected online community spaces, each space with its own norms, scale, and purpose? That’s the central question Josh Kramer and the team at New_ Public keep asking. New_ Public is a nonprofit R&D lab reimagining social media: designing digital public spaces that connect people, embrace pluralism, and build community.
Josh’s piece at The Elysian illustrates this vividly: a photographer in Japan uses AI to build a warm social space for his fans in a matter of hours. Canadians crowdfund a sovereign platform using federated protocols that still connects to the wider world. The tools are here. The movement is real. This feels like a genuine revival of what social media could be.
But connection within a space is only half the story. How do communities not only find their footing in the spaces they inhabit, but also reach across to other communities, turning their cosy neighbourhoods into a thriving Digital Global Village? It’s the framing at the heart of my own work.
What if we rebuilt that global village, with online neighbourhoods and back gardens for the small and intimate, town squares for the larger community spaces, and bridges for the connections across online communities?
Some questions I keep returning to in my work on growing thriving collaboration ecosystems:
- If every community gets to set its own norms, who takes responsibility for what happens at the edges, where communities meet?
- When community partners are spread across many different platforms and spaces, how do you know who’s talking to whom, and about what?
- How do organisations build shared understanding with community partners who live in entirely different digital worlds?
- As AI makes it easier to generate new community spaces, will we end up with richer, more impactful collaboration, or just more inward-looking fragmentation?
- And ultimately: can a thriving Digital Global Village of connected communities become a force for tackling the complex societal challenges none of us can solve alone?
Curious what you yourself see happening at this frontier.
