“It’s a really different world post-2016. The election may have helped fragment us more than we were fragmented,” says Ethan Zuckerman, the director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, who has grappled with the questions of a new, decentralized social sphere. “Maybe we’ve reached the point where it’s not even possible to have Facebook in common.”

There are concrete and at times uncomfortable signs that the social oligopoly may be ending. The same sorts of groups that, in the past, would stomp their feet and threaten to leave the big social networks and then fail are in small ways starting to succeed.

The big social networks have always really been broadcasters whose most valuable asset is your time. By centralizing distribution they assured there was always something worth your attention. But having grown unprecedentedly large, they became toxic and subject to manipulation. The attempts to rein in the ultimately ungovernable has meant that the platforms may become more like launching pads, spinning off niche networks of the disaffected. And while once it seemed like there was no more room for new social networks, there are a lot of recent indicators that they can again be born.