Last month during Meta's antitrust trial, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his company's focus has changed radically from where it began...[his] testimony implies that Facebook (Meta) may no longer be as much of an option if we actually want to talk to each other on line. But, neither are many of the other large social media sites.

...if companies allowed us to discover great new small blogs and small social media sites, many of us would decide to spend more time there. Then, companies would be less able to advertise to us on their own sites.

...we have been told by the mainstream media for well over a decade that small social media is dead. They say the same about small blogs, yet small blogs are actually more plentiful than ever, with over 600 million blogs on the Internet and about 7 million new blog articles published each day.

If you decide to create your own forum, do yourself a favor. The way to protect yourself and your users is by running your social media site at a domain that you own and on a server that you control, and don't agree to hand over any of your rights to anyone for any reason.

I believe large corporate-run social media sites are vulnerable in a way they have not been for twenty years. Their users have reached a state of extreme dissatisfaction with their "enshittified" platforms, and they are looking for something, anything, better.

But each of you who are reading these words can help end this situation by creating your own small social media site.

All you need to start your own small site is a domain name, a server that you can buy, rent, or set up on an old computer, perhaps social media software (see above), patience, a willingness to work, and ideas for ways of notifying potential users of the existence of your site.

Run your new site as you and your users see fit, and make it far superior to Facebook, Twitter (X), Reddit, or any of the other major sites whose owners think you have no other options.