The cosy-turn: theorising cosy community as emergent counter-infrastructure in platform capitalism

As trust in centralised social media platforms declines amid algorithmic harm, extractive data economies, and the erosion of psychological and epistemic safety, users are migrating toward smaller, semi-private digital spaces – a phenomenon some design and technology practitioners have termed the “cozy web.” While this shift is commonly characterised as retreat from digital publics, this paper offers the first sustained academic theorisation of the cosy web and the communities it gives rise to as a re-decentralisation of online social life and governance. Drawing on media and communication scholarship, feminist care ethics, and infrastructural critique, we conceptualise cosy communities as a distinct sociotechnical formation organised around care-centred governance, deliberate boundary-setting, and relational accountability – rather than visibility, automation, and scale. We build on the concept of cosy agency to describe the active work through which participants reconstruct stable, bounded digital environments in response to platform volatility, and draw on Giddens’ ontological security and Kelty's recursive publics to theorise the conditions under which such communities emerge and govern themselves. Examining three key terrains – decentralised and federated environments, independent hosted platforms, and enclaves within Big Social – we argue that cosy communities are not merely nostalgic retreats, but emergent counter-infrastructures that relocate governance from opaque platform systems to situated human judgement. The ‘cosy-turn’, we contend, represents a politics of maintenance and a reassertion of community as a governable social form within and against platform capitalism.