The final speakers in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference are Venessa Paech and Jennifer Beckett, whose focus is on the re-decentralisation of online community governance in the wake of recent changes to online environments. Many creators and community managers are now starting ‘cozy’ communities online, away from the major platforms; this project seeks to understand how and why they are doing this.
To do this, we must first understand digital sociality: investigating how we socialise in online spaces, and what it means to be a genuine online community. Platforms, follower bases, and audiences are not communities by default: real communities need to show aspects like defined membership, reciprocal influence, integration and fulfilment of needs, shared emotional connection, and immersion.
The concept of the ‘cozy Web’ addresses this, too: in between the dark forest of the open Web and the major platforms and the dark Web of underground and unregulated sites, there is a space of smaller-scale, bespoke communities hosted on smaller platforms. These are more artisanal and handmade; their pace is slower and their focus is on culture more than content, forging authentic social connections and enabling more agentic and intentional participation. These spaces are not driven by engagement metrics and content stickiness.
Why are these spaces emerging now? In part, they react to the problems of platform capitalism: they seek to push back against the overcommodification of online social spaces, the lack of care by platform providers, the exploitative, monopolistic, and surveillance practices that such platforms engage in, the data colonialism, platform imperialism, and general enshittification of the major platforms.
Such features have led to an emphasis on visibility labour, algorithmic cultures, context flattening, and digital harms, none of which are desirable for online communities; creators themselves are keen to regain their control and agency, avoid moral injury and ensure their own safety, reject platform politicisation, and become more proactive; there is also an element of digital nostalgia here, seeking to return to an earlier sense of online community as community.
Creators have largely lost any hope that the major platform providers themselves retain any interest in addressing the problems with their platforms. The pushback against this, and towards a cozy Web, therefore seeks to seize the means of production by building their own community spaces away from the major providers. This is akin to a return to the 1990s Internet, but with better technology and the lessons learnt from the past decades.
This also draws on the experience of professional community managers, emphasising a culture of care for and in the community. Such developments may lead to a larger-scale migration of users away from the larger platforms, re-empowering a new wave of community builders and members.
