For years, our social media experience has been dominated by Big Tech players like Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), Google (YouTube), Snapchat, TikTok, and X. But a growing number of startups are taking aim at these giants by creating new, often smaller and more personal social media experiences to connect people with friends, interests, and more cohesive communities.
If you’re looking for a way to break free from the trappings of mainstream social media and Big Tech products in general, there are many interesting options available. Many of them cater to Gen Z and the younger generation, a group that is often more willing to build social networks within new spaces compared to people with well-established networks living in aging spaces.
Below are some of our favorites, all worth downloading.
Retro
Retro is a carefully designed photo sharing app that focuses on building connections with friends in a highly private format. Created by two members of the Instagram team, Nathan Sharp and Ryan Olson, the app offers easy ways to share photos with important people in your life, as well as others that help you reconnect with your memories. You can choose specific photos to highlight each week, drop photos into albums, and find and track others with search features. You also have your own user profile that includes privacy controls that allow you to choose which of your friends you can see in addition to a number of your photos from the last month.
Retro: iOS/Android
The Cosmos
Are you the creative type sick of the AI slop on Pinterest? Another app, Cosmos, can provide an escape route. Called the “inspiration space,” Cosmos lets you search by color, keyword, or image, to customize a profile based on your preferences. You can also follow friends and other tastemakers and collaborate with others in groups. Overall, the app is more superior than Pinterest, and can be used to buy interesting products that match your style.
Cosmos: iOS/Android
Indigo
Want to get off X but don’t know which social network to choose – Mastodon or Bluesky? The Indigo app solves that problem by offering a single app where you can participate in both networks at the same time. The app offers an integrated timeline and composer that lets you post to both services at once, access to your custom feed, and tons of personalization tools and configuration settings. The app has some polish, co-created by Ben McCarthy, who also developed the Obscura line of apps and others, and freelance iOS designer Aaron Vegh.
Indigo: iOS only
It exists
Corner says it best, calling its app “Google Maps for the public,” which is an apt description. The company has a growing community of 125,000+ users who select their favorite destinations domestically and internationally and either “save” them or make them public for others to discover. With a definite Gen Z vibe, this isn’t just a place to find “good restaurants near me,” but to find unique lists, like those focused on where to find the best dumplings, queer nightlife, live jazz venues, non-club dance venues, indie bookstores, and anything else you want to categorize, organize, and recommend. The app provides a personal map where you can view your favorite places, ones you want to try, other people’s suggestions, and more. It’s like Google Maps if someone from 2026 designed it.
Available: iOS only
The divine
If you’re still missing Vine (thanks a lot, Twitter), you’ll want to download a reboot called Divine. Busy developer Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee, has imported the Vine archive into his team’s new app, which aims to give short video creators a home. The app hosts nearly 500,000 videos from nearly all Vine original creators and allows users to create their own six-second videos as well. Several former Vine creators have returned to the app, too, such as Lele Pons, JimmyHere, MightyDuck, and Jack and Jack, among others. The project also has financial support from Twitter founders and CEO Jack Dorsey’s non-profit organization, “And Other Things,” which aims to support open source community projects.
Top: iOS/Android/Web
Mesh
While it’s not exactly a social network in the sense that it’s a direct communication platform, Mesh is a useful tool to throw into your list of social media apps. The app is something like an address book on steroids, as it allows you to keep track of what people in your network – personal, professional, and otherwise – have done, by tracking LinkedIn or iX bio changes, posts, publications, and more. Also, Mesh provides tools that allow you to access and reconnect to the cadence you adjust, somewhat like a personal CRM. Acquired by WordPress.com owner Automattic in 2025 (then known as Clay), Mesh plans to offer deep integration with Automattic’s ubiquitous messaging app, Beeper – which you should download as well.
Mesh: iOS/Desktop/Web
A legend
The book club’s community app Tales recently got an upgrade that makes it worth another look, even if it’s not your primary book tracker. The company now offers a bundled service with digital reading subscription provider Everand (both owned by Scribd), which offers access to 1.5 million ebooks and audiobooks from major publishers and more. Your ratings and reviews are then synced to Fable, where you can see recommendations from others and join virtual book clubs. Goodreads anyone?
To be honest, there are so many book trackers to choose from these days that it’s hard to narrow things down. I personally also enjoy Bookshelf, Reading Journey (which has a great widget), Margins, TBR, and PageBound, but there’s more! We really have a lot of options in this space, so why not just download them all?
Legend: iOS/Android
A locket
Locket is one of the pioneers of the idea of putting your friends right on your iPhone’s home screen. The social networking app offers a live widget that updates as your friends upload new photos or messages, to which you can reply with a lightweight chat option. You can also participate in weekly photo dumps, follow your favorite artists, and more.
Lock: iOS/Android
AirPods
Apple and Spotify have never had social media platforms built around music well, but it seems the AirPods have. The app is a social network where you share what you broadcast with your friends, and build on that functionality to offer a range of other features. You can react to your friends’ music choices with emojis, stickers, or selfies, play clips of your friends’ newly streamed songs, send messages to friends, edit your profile with favorite bands, or participate in music-related activities such as music quizzes, toasting your music style, or finding out which friend has the same taste in music, to name a few.
AirPods: iOS/Android
the mall
The newly launched app The Mall turns online shopping into a social experience. The application provides a universal feed of the following updates and new releases from your favorite brands, especially fashion – although you can add others with an e-commerce storefront. Also, you can visit friends’ profiles to see what kind of items are in their collection and “mall” and get inspiration and recommendations of other brands you might like, based on your tastes and style.
Mall: iOS (waiting list)
A shelf
The main idea of the shelf is to give you a way to organize what you love — meaning music, movies, TV shows, books, and other things you love. By doing so, the shelf allows you to learn more about yourself, get personalized snapshots, dive into segmentation trends, and more. But the social element comes into play here, too, because you can browse friends’ shelves as sources of inspiration. And, unlike traditional social media, the Shelf is private by default because it’s not leveraged; it’s about keeping track of your digital life and interests, and those of your friends.
Shelf: iOS
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