When we talk about social networks, we often focus on metrics like viral growth, daily active users, engagement rates. But the most enduring social networks aren’t the prettiest or the most addictive – it’s the ones that empower organizers.
Who Are Organizers?
When I say "organizers," I’m talking about coaches, teachers, volunteer coordinators, union stewards, event planners, health workers, running club hosts, activist organizers, and owners of community-based businesses like music schools, summer camps, and business improvement districts. What unites them isn't a job title; it's their role in making decisions on behalf of a group – choosing the tools and setting the norms that help people connect with each other, contribute their strengths, and turn a collection of individuals into a functioning community.
The Organizer's Calculus
Consider Google Forms. It's not winning any design awards. Typeform is prettier. Airtable is more sophisticated. Yet, to my pride and chagrin, Google Forms remains ubiquitous because it gives organizers exactly what they need. After someone fills out your form, you get a spreadsheet. You can sort it, filter it, share it with co-organizers, and manipulate the data however you need. This is a choice made for the convenience of organizers, not respondents.
The idea for Google Forms came from an unexpected pattern. My research partner and I interviewed two wildly different groups: an ER department scheduling physician shifts across six-month rotations, and sorority alums who described how they managed an application process with dozens of decision-makers and hundreds of candidates. Both used spreadsheets the same way. A small number of organizers designed the structure, many contributors filled it in. So we designed for asymmetric complexity, making it dead simple to contribute, but giving organizers the tools to orchestrate.
The same principle explains why Facebook Groups remain one of the stickiest features of that aging giant, with 1.6 billion users. Despite the platform's many problems, Groups offer something crucial: tools that work for both organizers and members. Organizers get privacy settings and moderation controls. Members get a space to share content, ask questions, comment on each other's posts, and build conversations over time in a familiar interface. These features may seem mundane, but they're what enable thousands of communities to actually function. (You can read more about Buy Nothing groups in Tim Donnelly’s “Can Buy Nothing Groups Exist Without Facebook?”, and about patient groups in multiple peer-reviewed articles on youth care, lung cancer, chronic pain, and more.)
Organizers as Leverage Points
Here's something product teams often miss: organizers are pivot points for software adoption at scale. When a PTA president chooses a platform for school communications or a youth sports coordinator picks a scheduling tool, hundreds of people sign up—not because they independently evaluated options, but because the organizer chose for them.
This creates a completely different growth dynamic than consumer social apps that rely on viral individual adoption. One satisfied organizer can bring an entire community onto a platform overnight. Conversely, one frustrated organizer can migrate an entire community away just as quickly.
The math is compelling: winning over one person who manages a community of 500 people is exponentially more valuable than winning over 500 people one at a time. Yet most social networks optimize their onboarding, features, and support for individual users, while forgetting to build superpowers for organizers.
Social Software for Life, Not Performance
Most people have extremely limited time and appetite for social media of the tweet/skeet/reel variety. But these same people do use social software extensively — just not for performance. They use it to engage in the actual business of life:
Independent journalists coordinating coverage of breaking news across time zones and pooling FOIA requests
People with rare diseases sharing clinical trial information, treatment outcomes, and personal experiences
Freelance translators sharing rate benchmarks, vetting agencies, and warning each other about clients who don't pay
A local tool library managing equipment loans, workshops, and sharing DIY advice
Professional communities organizing a mentorship program or job postings
Community fridges coordinating food donations, pickup schedules, and volunteer cleaning shifts
Research consistently shows that passive consumption far exceeds active posting, and the majority of social media users are lurkers rather than regular contributors. But people are regularly using social software: the person who hasn't tweeted in months is sending twenty messages a day in their youth soccer league chat coordinating game schedules and field assignments. The parent with zero public posts is running the school fundraiser, managing a spreadsheet of 50 volunteers, and sending updates about pickup times and donation drop-offs. This is where social software acts as essential infrastructure, not optional entertainment.
From Dark Forests and Cozy Webs to a Federation of Hives
Maggie Appleton's "The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web" describes how people retreat from the public internet into cozier, safer private spaces. But I don't see them all as random, comfortable hideaways — they're semi-permeable communities organized around shared purpose. Some groups are tightly closed. Others have porous boundaries. What they share is the need to connect and coordinate without broadcasting to the entire internet.
Organizers need infrastructure that respects this reality. Not a single platform that hosts everything, but protocols and tools that let communities maintain their boundaries while still connecting where they choose.
What AT Protocol Can Do for Organizers
Today, when you run a community, you're forced into platform lock-in. Facebook Groups might be convenient, but you're stuck with their moderation decisions, privacy policies, and feature roadmap. Your community's data, relationships, and history are trapped. Signal might be more privacy-aware, but it lacks basic organizing features: no threading for complex discussions, no event coordination, no file organization beyond a shared media dump.
So you end up cobbling together workarounds: Signal for chat, Google Sheets for RSVPs, Venmo for payments, each requiring separate membership management. Every platform forces you to trade off between features, privacy, control, and portability. There's no way to take what works from each.
In his recent post "Community Spaces on AT Protocol," Bryan Newbold explores how ATProto could enable a different model. He points out that ATProto’s portable identity system (DIDs) and permission structures (lists) give us a way to define a group and have those permissions travel across applications. A photographers’ collective could have a membership list at at://did:plc:xyz123/app.bsky.graph.list/photo-coop that's referenced by a calendar app for workshop schedules, a messaging app for pitch collaboration, and a file-sharing tool for contract templates and rate sheets. Update the list once, permissions propagate everywhere. Update the list once, permissions propagate everywhere.
But three pieces need to come together:
Granular permissions. Bryan’s post shows how DIDs and lists can combine to define flexible roles. We need some specific, thoughtful patterns for this. This will allow organizers to delegate responsibilities and manage the structured permissions that larger communities require.
Private data infrastructure. Currently, there's nowhere to store group membership lists, chat histories, or shared files except the fully-public PDS. The latest vision involves “namespaces” alongside the public repo, but this is still in development. Until a private data layer is available, we’re back to either fully public social media or off-protocol walled gardens.
Interconnected apps. Even with the right primitives, the ecosystem needs developers who build for interconnection when it counts.
When these 3 pieces come together, the dynamic will shift: features can extend what's possible rather than competing to capture membership.
That’s the promise. How do we get there faster?
Let's Build for Organizers
If we take this seriously, what does it mean for developers?
Spend time in community. There is no better way to understand social dynamics than to participate in society. Coach a team, join a volunteer group, help run an event. Pay attention to the invisible work that makes these groups function, and experience firsthand how software can hurt or help.
Recognize organizers as high-leverage decision makers. Build onboarding, documentation, and features that acknowledge organizers are making decisions for entire communities.
Give organizers the controls they need. This means thoughtful moderation tools, flexible privacy settings, and the ability to establish and enforce community norms.
Make the data accessible and portable. Give organizers their data in formats they can actually use and reuse.
Design for cross-tool coordination. Think about how groups, messaging, events, and other interaction patterns should work together, not as separate silos.
Respect community permissions. The future isn't necessarily fully public or fully private. Build for different levels of privacy, inclusiveness, and comfort.
The systems that endure won't be the ones that maximize engagement metrics or build the most addictive feed algorithms. They'll be the ones that give people what we actually need: tools to organize our lives and societies, together.