Digital Campfires: Why the Internet Is Getting Smaller on Purpose

The Bonfire Replaces the Billboard

In 2020, the marketing strategist Sara Wilson coined the term "digital campfires" to describe a shift she was observing in how people used the internet. The broadcast era of social media — where the goal was to reach the largest possible audience — was giving way to something quieter, more intimate, and more intentional. People were not leaving the internet. They were leaving the town square and gathering around campfires.

Wilson identified three types of digital campfires: private messaging (WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage groups), micro-communities (Discord servers, private Slack groups, small Facebook groups), and shared experiences (multiplayer games, watch parties, co-listening sessions). What they all had in common was intimacy — a deliberate retreat from the scale and exposure of public social media.

The data confirms the shift. WhatsApp has over 2 billion monthly active users and carries more messages per day than any public social network. Discord grew from 140 million monthly active users in 2020 to over 200 million by 2024. Substack's most successful publications thrive not because of their public reach but because of their private comment sections and subscriber-only communities. The fastest-growing segments of online interaction are all private or semi-private.

The internet is not dying. It is getting smaller on purpose.

Why People Are Choosing Smaller

The shift to digital campfires is not random. It is a rational response to specific problems with the broadcast social media model:

Exhaustion from performance. Public social media requires constant self-presentation. Every post is a performance before an audience of varying size and composition. Research from the University of Pittsburgh found that passive consumption of social media (scrolling without posting) was associated with increased loneliness, while active engagement (direct messaging and small-group interaction) was associated with decreased loneliness. People are not lonely because they use the internet. They are lonely because they use the internet as an audience, not as a conversationalist.

Desire for genuine conversation. In a public forum, you speak to be heard. In a small group, you speak to communicate. The psychological difference is enormous. Communication research has consistently shown that people disclose more, listen more carefully, and engage more thoughtfully in small-group settings than in large-audience settings. The campfire is where people actually talk. The billboard is where they perform.

Safety from the dark forest. The hostility, surveillance, and bot saturation of the public internet makes private spaces feel necessary for genuine expression. People share their real thoughts in group chats because group chats feel safe. They self-censor on Twitter because Twitter feels dangerous. The retreat to campfires is, in part, a retreat from a public internet that has become hostile to honesty.

Craving for depth over breadth. The average person does not want to be connected to everyone. They want to be deeply connected to a few. Public social media offers breadth (thousands of shallow connections) but not depth (a few profound ones). Campfire-scale communities offer the opposite. And research on wellbeing consistently shows that it is the depth of social connections, not the breadth, that predicts happiness, health, and life satisfaction.

The History of Small-Scale Internet

The campfire trend feels new, but it is actually a return to the internet's origins. Before social media, the internet was almost entirely campfire-scale:

Usenet groups (1980s-1990s) were small, focused communities organized by topic. Most active groups had a few hundred regular participants. The culture was conversational, not performative. People posted under persistent pseudonyms and built reputations over months and years.

IRC channels (1990s-2000s) were real-time chat rooms organized by interest. The typical active channel had 20-50 regular users. Conversations were spontaneous, tangential, and intimate in a way that modern social media never achieves.

Early blogging (2000s) was a network of personal sites where people wrote for small audiences of dedicated readers. The comment sections were conversations, not battlegrounds. Bloggers knew their commenters by name. The scale was human.

Web forums (2000s-2010s) organized communities around specific topics — a particular video game, a programming language, a hobby, a genre of music. The best forums were vibrant intellectual communities where expertise was shared generously and newcomers were mentored by veterans.

Social media did not replace these spaces because it was better at fostering community. It replaced them because it was better at capturing attention and monetizing it. The broadcast model was more profitable, even as it was worse for human connection. The campfire trend is, in a sense, the internet remembering what it was for.

The Campfire Economy

The shift to campfires creates a problem for the dominant internet business model. Advertising works at scale — it requires large audiences, detailed behavioral data, and algorithmic targeting. Campfire-scale communities do not generate the volume of data or attention that advertising requires. This is why the major platforms have resisted the campfire trend even as their users demand it: the business model does not support it.

But alternative models are emerging. Substack's subscription model funds writers through reader support rather than advertising. Discord's server boost model lets communities fund themselves through member contributions. Patreon and similar platforms enable creators to build sustainable campfire-scale audiences. The economics of small-scale community are different from the economics of mass media, but they are viable.

The key insight is that people will pay for quality — for spaces where the conversation is good, the participants are genuine, and the experience is not degraded by advertising, algorithmic manipulation, or bot activity. The campfire does not need to be as profitable as the billboard. It just needs to be sustainable.

Digital Campfires Meet AI Matching

The campfire model has one significant weakness: discovery. In the broadcast era, finding interesting content and people was effortless — the algorithm fed it to you. In the campfire era, finding the right campfire to sit around is the hard problem. Most people end up in campfires formed by circumstance — a friend's Discord server, a coworker's WhatsApp group — rather than campfires formed by genuine intellectual resonance.

This is where AI-powered semantic matching changes the equation. Instead of relying on social connections or keyword searches to find your campfire, AI can analyze your actual intellectual interests — through your writing, notes, and creative output — and match you with campfires where people share those interests at a deep level.

kndred is built on this premise: concept-based rooms that function as digital campfires, with membership determined by genuine intellectual overlap rather than social connections. The rooms are small by design. The conversation is real-time. The participants have all demonstrated genuine engagement with the topic through their own writing. It is the campfire model with the discovery problem solved.

The Future Is Small

The broadcast era of social media was an experiment. The results are in: it captured attention brilliantly and fostered connection poorly. The loneliness epidemic, the dark forest retreat, the collapse of trust in public discourse — these are not unrelated phenomena. They are the predictable consequences of building social infrastructure around broadcast mechanics.

The campfire era is the correction. Not a rejection of the internet, but a recalibration — from reach to resonance, from audience to conversation, from scale to intimacy. The internet is getting smaller on purpose because smaller is where the good conversations happen.

The question is not whether the shift will continue. It is whether we build platforms that support it — platforms designed for campfire-scale interaction, with the AI-powered discovery to match people with the right campfire. The future of online community is not a billion people in one room. It is a million rooms of ten people each, every one of them talking about something that matters to them.

That is a future worth building toward.