Less generalist social networks, to each his own tribe

Running shoes on your feet and a connected smartphone in your hands. Now even for marathon runners - amateurs or professionals - the challenge passes through the web. And so Strava, born a good sixteen years ago and still one of the most popular apps among runners, holds together a new sociality between virtual screens and real competitions. It is social-data time with training performances, passionate competitions, and constant community relations.

Here one becomes vertical around a real practice - running or cycling - beyond the mere exchange of multimedia content. Physical activity is tracked, measured and made alive in the tribe, with the runner who goes from being mere data back to being a person. 'Strava plans Wall Street debut', the Financial Times headlined a few days ago, anticipating one of the next IPOs in the tech sphere. The numbers attest to this: 50 million monthly active users and +80% annual growth, with a boom from the elusive Generation Z. With these numbers, the platform has pulled a long way ahead of its competitors. The company was valued at $2.2 billion. From community to community is a short step. "The growth has coincided with the fashion for running, particularly among young people who are interested in healthier lifestyles. Over 1.1 million people have applied to take part in the 2026 London Marathon, an increase of +31% on last year,' writes Stephanie Stacey. But there's more. A growing proportion are using the platform as if it were a dating app. A way to get the right match within the same tribe, while multiplying the bubble effect. Welcome to the social that is no longer social. Because platforms confuse the cards by mixing entertainment, relationship, data tracking, not necessarily in that precise order.

The new Digital 2026 report by We Are Social in collaboration with Meltwater and previewed in Il Sole 24 Ore also shows how users are looking for something else than in the past. Although for the big tech companies the challenge is always the same: to win the battle for attention in the digital agon. There are always them, but with some new entries. Although their downsizing has been predicted for some time, in addition to communication hype, social media lead consumption, with a usage rate of 89.3 per cent.

Italians spend almost 5 days a week on it, more than any other medium. TikTok is the most used with 1 hour and 30 minutes per day. This is followed by YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp. Generative AI is firmly entering the media diet: 26.2% have used generative AI tools in the last month. "These platforms become immediate visual recommendation engines. While discovery used to take place via keywords on Google, it now takes place via customised feeds, creators, spontaneous reviews and bottom-up content. At the same time, globally, monthly search engine usage is declining, a trend that started well before the arrival of generative AI: this signals that the search path is fragmenting and is no longer centralised. And this is where AI comes in, representing the natural evolution of the way people search for information. Users no longer want to 'browse links', but to get concise, personalised and contextualised answers. Navigation is no longer a straight line, but a fluid path that moves between platforms, algorithms and new forms of trust,' says Marta Prosperi, Influencer Marketing & Strategy Director at We Are Social.

But if AI becomes a new level of mediation, on the device side we are still at the 'smartphone-get-it-all' stage. "Even this year, messaging apps remain among the platforms most used by Italians because they are the immediate infrastructure of everyday communication. In addition to these, private chats within social networks have taken on a central role. Together they form a single ecosystem in which direct messages dominate: most sharing now takes place in closed spaces where reels, posts, links and content are exchanged with a higher level of trust, personalisation and intimacy than in public feeds. Now interactions with intelligent assistants often take place in the form of a private chat, with a conversational tone. A personal, needs-oriented space,' Prosperi points out. But despite a globalised tech world, there is no Esperanto because the languages of digital are different and the social spread is uneven. A jagged ecosystem, in short.