You’ve got your run-of-the-mill trolls (nothing new), engagement bait (also old news). But now, you’ve also got AI-gen content and bots running rampant, making it impossible to take anything at face-value anymore. Which is why these new little private spaces are popping up more and more. These are dark forests. Online spaces that appear quiet and still but, underneath the surface, are teeming with life. So, wait. What exactly is the dark forest movement? Here’s what you need to know

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

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And as you can imagine, the backlash has been immediate and loud. Users are responding with a full-blown "QuitGPT" movement, calling for mass cancellations and account deletions.

OpenAI has spent years positioning itself to care about safety and ethics and beneficial use cases. And now, they're directly working with the military. For a lot of people (most of us), that's a line you don't cross. The company is framing it as defensive applications. They say it's used for research and analysis rather than offensive weapons systems. But that distinction doesn't mean much when the end result is still putting AI in the hands of the war machine.

Here’s me thinking “thankfully I use Claude.” And then I saw that the U.S. military reportedly used Claude in recent Iran strikes, Jesus take the fkn wheel. This is crazy for several reasons. First, Trump issued a ban on using certain AI tools for military operations, and Claude was supposedly on that list. Second, Anthropic has explicitly positioned itself as the AI safety company. They say they're the alternative to OpenAI's increasingly commercial and compromised approach.

And now it turns out the military has been using their model anyway, either without Anthropic's knowledge or with sneaky approval that contradicts everything they've said publicly. If Anthropic didn't authorise this, it raises serious questions about how their models are being accessed and deployed. If they did authorise it, then their entire brand is a lie. Either way, it's a disaster. The AI safety community is furious. Users feel betrayed. And Anthropic now has to explain how their tool ended up being used in military strikes when they've spent years insisting they're different from everyone else.

In better news: Instagram just announced it will start alerting parents if their teens search for self-harm or suicide content on the platform. It's framed as a safety feature; a way to catch warning signs early and get kids help before things escalate. And sure, in theory that sounds good. But it feels like Instagram trying to offload responsibility for the harm its platform causes onto parents. The app has spent years amplifying content that's algorithmically proven to worsen mental health in teenagers, promoting extreme body standards, comparison culture, and toxic communities. And now instead of fundamentally changing how the platform works, they're just going to send parents a notification and call it solved. Idk chat, it’s progress for sure, but do we think it’s enough?? 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

If you say you don’t, you’re lying. I’m sorry. There’s just something that feels so good about being somewhere most people aren’t. It’s human nature. Sue me.

Let’s face the facts: the public internet is not a place many people want to be right now. Overrun with bots, AI slop, engagement bait, surveillance, trolls, and an increasingly hostile attention economy that exhausts everyone who participates in it.

And I’ve noticed a number of people starting to build "private internets." Carving out intentional spaces that exist outside the algorithmic chaos. Creating what some are calling "dark forests", basically hidden, invite-only worlds where real humans gather (without the predators).

This is the middle ground for people who don't want to join the carnivalesque, sweaty underground wrestling clubs, but also can't stomach the public internet as it currently exists.

The concept of dark forests comes from Liu Cixin's sci-fi trilogy and was applied to the internet by Yancey Strickler back in 2019. The metaphor? Imagine a dark forest at night. It's quiet, nothing moves, you might assume it's empty. But it's not - it's full of life. The forest is quiet because that's when predators come out. To survive, everything stays silent.

The public internet has become that forest full of predators. Yes, real human ones, but also ads, tracking, trolling, bots and AI scraping your content dry to train its models.

We exist in a time where, increasingly, more content is generated by machines than humans. So real humans are going quiet and retreating to private channels where they can actually exist without being hunted. Strickler wrote about this six years ago. Now, in 2026, it's no longer theory and people are building the infrastructure to make it work.

These are not social media platforms trying to maximise engagement. They are not trying to scale to billions. They're just intentional communities of 20, 50, 200 people who actually want to be there.

Metalabel (the team behind DFOS) puts it perfectly: the most important places have always been the spaces we can't see. The group chats, shared docs, Discords with 50 active members. Groups, not audiences. Real communities held together with duct tape and volunteer time.

This is what I mean by private internets where creative groups can actually collaborate and build without the noise. The team at Metalabel have moved entirely into their own DFOS space. “We're building the bridge to the new creative era. Where we're going: aligned, self-controlled, building and sharing value in worlds of our own.”

That's what people are craving. Genuine connection and collaboration in online spaces again. Something that’s been lost along the way of bots and optimisation and the whole mess that the internet has become right now.

Some people made it to the top, and everyone else burnt out from trying.

The indie internet rejects that entire model. It's not about scale or reach. It's about depth, quality over quantity and being known by the right 200 people instead of vaguely familiar to 20,000.

This ties directly into fractured virality - the shift from mass reach to niche community resonance. But it goes further. It's not just about reaching specific communities on public platforms. It's about creating entirely separate spaces where those communities can exist on their own terms.

No algorithms deciding what you see or jumpscare freaking ads interrupting conversation. No bots or trolls. No performance anxiety about posting (lorrrrd please.) Just people who chose to be there, gathering in a space they collectively control.

The public internet has become genuinely hostile (as I so often like to mention lol). AI is flooding platforms with synthetic content (see: Pinterest). Engagement bait dominates feeds. Privacy is an absolute joke. Community guidelines are inconsistently enforced. And the platforms themselves are increasingly unstable takes deeeeep breath.

People are tired. I AM TIRED. We are tired: exhausted from performing. And optimising and being forced to feed an algorithm that couldn’t care less about us. The public internet is hardly the most viable space for genuine connection or creative work. In fact, it’s laying in a hospital bed flatlining. Even Sam Altman, part of the cause of all this mess, recently admitted it.

Metalabel hinges on the idea that togetherness is the key to infrastructure designed specifically to make creative groups more capable. Not individuals building personal brands, but collectives working together in shared private spaces.

"As individuals our powers are limited," they write. "In groups we become exponentially stronger."

This is a fundamental shift in how we think about the internet. The first era empowered individuals to discover and become themselves online. This next era gives groups those same powers.

Instead of everyone performing for invisible audiences on public platforms, we'd see more small intentional groups gathering in private worlds they control. Instead of chasing scale, choosing intimacy. Instead of building personal brands, building collective capacity.

The public internet won't disappear. But it could eventually become a wasteland of bots talking to bots, ads served to no one, engagement bait circulating endlessly while many of the real humans have retreated to their dark forests.

The indie internet is here. The question is just whether you're ready to leave the carnival behind and find your forest.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

People are using audio from the Danganronpa "After School Lesson" execution scene where character Kyoko is being pulled on a conveyor belt toward a trash compactor. Every time the compactor slams down, she jumps in her seat because she knows what's coming. People are shaking their phones on beat to match that nervous energy while captioning "how it feels to ___" with situations where they're dreading something inevitable. It's that specific anxiety of watching something stressful slowly unfold and knowing you can't escape it.

My fav examples include:

Use the Danganronpa "After School Lesson" audio. Shake your phone on beat while captioning "how it feels to ___" with a situation where you're dreading something inevitable that's slowly approaching.

A few ideas to get you started:

-abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

😂Yap’s funniest home videos: He really fell for her
❤How wholesome: These foxes can’t stop laughing
😊Soooo satisfying: Big bottles down the stairs
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Simple burrito bowl

Hey Ciara!

The short answer is that you don't. You shouldn't try to take something that takes 30 minutes to explain and cram it into a 30-second video. Your socials are top-of-funnel, so they're for building brand awareness. Your content is how people will discover you and how they'll start trusting you. The actual sales process will happen later in 1-on-1 conversations with people. This is where you can explain all the ins and outs of your product. If you're trying to do that in your content, you'll always feel like you're dumbing yourself down. So let your content do what it's intended for—building an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you. That’s it.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.