# @shazow: Social venues vs social networks—building spaces for friendship

Source: https://farcaster.xyz/shazow.eth/0x9449e444
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/shazow-Social-venues-vs-social-networksbuilding-spaces-for-friendship?index=0x6977e1d46603d8276f442f699d87b93eb18a090c23238ba8c2132a837c7e95e901196e43
Submitted by tim on 2026-01-26 UTC, 2 upvotes, 0 comments

## Summary

Shazow argues that online spaces should be judged as social venues, meaning places for making friends and meeting in person, rather than as social networks or social media, which the author says are defined by business models focused on consumption and status. Twitter was a social venue around 2009, where the author made many friends, but it later became mostly about consumption or conflict. The author describes Farcaster in 2024 as a great social venue, citing local meetups, poker games and friendships that continued in person, and contrasts it with friends who moved to Bluesky or Mastodon. The post closes by asking how to build healthy online social venues that can persist and thrive.

## Article

❌ Social Network
❌ Social Media
✔️ Social Venue

A social venue is about people. It is a place to make new friends, have abundant opportunities to deepen our friendships, and ultimately spend more time together in-person.

A social venue can be a pub, a poker club, a chat group, a subreddit, or a feed of writing and images from people you follow.

Social networks and social media have become terms burdened by their business models. They are about consumption and status. A chat group on Signal is not a social network or social media. An infinite feed of 60-second clips by random people is social media but it is not a social venue.

In 2009, Twitter was an amazing social venue. I met many friends there, and enriched my existing friendships by having daily interactions I otherwise would not (even if it was just about sharing a pic of a sandwich). It hasn't felt the same for a long time--on the best days it is about consumption and on the worst days it is a battlefield.

In 2024, Farcaster was a great social venue. I started going to local meetups hosted by @links, I competed in club @ted's poker games, I bought @samantha's incredible candles. I met many mutuals and some of them I still see in-person regularly!

Making friends on Farcaster is a rare and extremely valuable thing to me, something that was a stark contrast with my friends who fled to Bluesky or Mastodon. I'd ask them "when was the last time you met people you follow irl?" and they'd look at me weird because that's what was conditioned out of us for the past decade.

Online social venues is a big part of The Internet We Lost. Partly because of sheer scale of the internet (loss of cozy corners), and partly because our power structures have converged our norms into the present we live in.

I want to talk less about social networks and social media, and more about social venues.

How do we create healthy online social venues that can persist and thrive?