Not long ago, a post of mine went viral. Within hours, my notifications were flooded, and buried among the likes and shares were comments that stopped me in my tracks. “OMG, I haven’t seen you in the longest time.” “Hey Mark, I didn’t know you were still here, I never see you anymore.” “Where have you been?” Some of those names I recognized immediately, people who had been part of my online world for years, fellow travelers in the communities I had built around wellness, recovery, and finding joy in everyday life. They hadn’t gone anywhere. Neither had I. The algorithm had simply decided, without asking either of us, that we no longer needed to see each other.
That moment stayed with me. Not because it was surprising, but because it was the clearest illustration I had seen of something I had been feeling for a long time: the communities we built online, the ones that once felt like real, living, breathing spaces of connection, had been quietly dismantled around us while we were still showing up.
I have spent fifteen years as an online creator, and so much has changed in that time, not only online but in the world as a whole.
When I started out, it was all about connecting with people in real time, all over the world. Learning about different customs, different languages, different ways of life, right from the comfort of your own home, and from people you actually followed and who often followed you back. For years, it was about connection, communication, and a genuine sense of community, or at least it was for me and for many of the people I interacted with. It was fun, playful, enjoyable, and often genuinely informative. There was something almost magical about it, the idea that you could wake up in the morning and be part of a conversation happening simultaneously in Toronto, London, Sydney, and São Paulo.
But as the years passed, that started to shift. The introduction of brand partnerships changed things a little, but creators and followers who were genuinely looking for meaning and connection could work around that. It was manageable. Then pay-per-view models entered the picture, and with them came a fundamental change in what creators were making content for. A significant portion of what filled our feeds stopped being about sharing and connecting, and started being about shock, awe, and occasionally inspiration, but mostly the first two. The landscape began to look very different from what it once had been.
As brands became more deeply embedded and advertising bled further into our feeds, the experience drifted further and further from what it had originally felt like. Those casual, warm exchanges with everyday people from across the world slowly gave way to something that felt more like a game of pay to play. And yet, even through all of that, people found ways to stay connected. Communities adapted. Creators and their followers found workarounds, pockets of realness within the increasingly commercialized space.
Then the platforms themselves seemed to turn against the very communities that had built them.
By 2025, it felt like the people who had followed you for years, the people you had followed back, the ones who had taught you things and made you laugh and shown up in your comments through good times and hard ones, had simply vanished from your feed. In their place were ads, brand content, and creators you had never encountered before. The feed that had once felt like walking into a familiar room full of people you knew had become a corridor of strangers and sponsored content.
By the time 2026 arrived, most creators were reporting a real and painful disconnect: their content wasn’t reaching the people who had chosen to follow them, and their followers were left wondering why their feeds had become unrecognizable. The reasoning has various layers, but at its core it comes down to money. Organic reach was quietly strangled in favor of paid promotion, and the communities that had once formed naturally around shared interests and genuine relationships were left scattered, unsure whether the spaces they had belonged to even still existed.
What made this especially striking was happening in parallel in the wider world. Over those same fifteen years, people went from spending perhaps sixty minutes a day online to, in many cases, several hours. What had once supplemented real-world connection, the in-person meetups, the friendships that started online and became real-life ones, began to replace it. Studies consistently show that people are connecting less in person than they used to, even as they spend more time online. The cruel irony is that the online communities that might have compensated for that lost in-person connection are the very ones the platforms have made increasingly difficult to access and maintain.
If the communities you once belonged to are no longer appearing in your feed, if the people who used to be a daily presence in your life are now hidden behind an algorithm you have no control over, are you really still part of those communities? Would you even know if they stopped being there?
I think about that a lot.
So what do we do now? How do we stay connected and keep our communities alive when we are still thousands of miles apart, but the platforms that once bridged that distance have actively worked to sever the connection?
From everything I have seen and experienced, the answer is smaller, more intentional spaces. Communities that exist off the major platforms, where people can actually talk to each other, share what’s really going on, show up on a video call, and support one another in ways that the algorithm cannot suppress or monetize. Places where the relationship between the people in the room is the whole point, not the byproduct of someone else’s business model.
But it doesn’t stop there. Beyond the screen, we need to get back into the world and connect in real, tangible ways. Call the people you love. Write a letter to remind someone you are thinking of them. Find the small, local spaces that bring people together to lift each other up. Choose your chosen family deliberately and tend to those relationships with the same care you would anything that matters.
Whether you have people around you or not, whether you know a lot of people or just a few, whether you are the person who loves to support others or you are the one who quietly needs a little support yourself right now, this is what 2026 calls for. Finding the places and spaces that remind you that you are not alone. That someone, even if they are miles away, is rooting for you. For your success, for your joy, for the full and meaningful life you deserve to be living.
The platforms changed the rules without asking us. But they cannot change the fact that human beings are wired for connection. We will find a way, we always do. We just have to be a little more intentional about where we look for it now.