Beyond Instagram: Introducing the next generation of social apps

For years, our social media experiences have been dominated by Big Tech players like Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), Google (YouTube), Snapchat, TikTok and X. But a growing number of startups are targeting these giants by building new, often smaller and more personalized social networking experiences to connect people with friends, interests and closer communities.

If you’re looking for a way to get yourself out of the grip of traditional social media and Big Tech products in general, there are a number of interesting alternatives available. Many of them are aimed at Gen Z and younger, a group that is often more willing to build their social networks within new spaces compared to people with well-established networks sitting on aging platforms.

Below are some of our favorites, all of which are worth downloading.

Retro

Retro is a thoughtfully designed photo sharing app that focuses on connecting with friends in a more private format. Created by two former Instagram team members, Nathan Sharp and Ryan Olson, the app offers simple ways to share photos with the people in your life who matter, as well as others, to help you reconnect with your own memories. You can select specific photos to highlight each week, dump photos into albums, and find and follow others via search features. You also have your own user profile that includes privacy controls that allow you to choose which of your friends can see more than your last month’s photos.

Retro: iOS/Android

Cosmos

Are you the creative type who is tired of artificial intelligence on Pinterest? Another app, Cosmos, could offer an escape. Called a “room for inspiration,” Cosmos lets you search by color, keyword, or image to shape a profile based on your tastes. You can also follow friends and other tastemakers and collaborate with others on collections. Overall, the app is a bit more elevated than Pinterest and can also be used to shop for interesting products that match your style.

Cosmos: iOS/Android

Indigo

Want to get out of X but don’t know which decentralized social network to choose – Mastodon or Bluesky? Indigo’s app solves that problem by offering a single app where you can join both networks at once. The app offers a unified timeline and composer that lets you cross-post to both services at once, access to your custom feeds, and tons of personalization tools and configuration options. The app has some polish, having been created by Ben McCarthy, who also developed the Obscura series of apps and others with freelance iOS designer Aaron Vegh.

Indigo: iOS only

Corner

Corner says it best, calling his app “Google Maps but social,” which is an apt description. The company has a growing community of around 125,000+ users who aggregate their favorite places both locally and abroad into lists that they can “gatekeep” or publish for others to discover. With a decidedly Gen Z vibe, this isn’t just a place to find “good restaurants near me,” but to uncover unique lists, like those that focus on where to find the best dumplings, queer nightlife, live jazz venues, places to dance that aren’t clubs, indie bookstores, and anything else you want to categorize, organize, and recommend. The app also provides a personal map where you can see 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.

Corner: iOS only

divine

If you’re still missing Vine (thanks a lot, Twitter), you’ll want to download the reboot called Divine. Enterprising developer Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee, imported the Vine archive into his team’s new app, which aims to provide a home for short-form video creators. The app hosts about 500,000 videos from nearly 100,000 original Vine creators and allows users to re-create their own six-second videos. Several early Vine creators have also returned to the app, such as Lele Pons, JimmyHere, MightyDuck and Jack and Jack, among others. The project also has financial backing from Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey’s nonprofit organization, “and Other Stuff,” which aims to support open source social projects.

Divine: iOS/Android/Web

Mesh

While not exactly a social network in the sense of being a platform for direct connection, Mesh is a useful tool to throw into your selection of networking apps. The app is kind of like an address book on steroids, as it lets you track what people in your network—personally, professionally, and otherwise—have been up to by tracking LinkedIn or X bio changes, posts, publications, and more. Plus, Mesh provides tools that allow you to reach out and reconnect at a cadence you configure, kind of like a personal CRM. Acquired by WordPress.com owner Automattic in 2025 (when it was known as Clay), Mesh plans to offer deeper integrations with Automattic’s universal messaging app, Beeper — which you’ll also need to download, by the way.

Mesh: iOS/Desktop/Web

Fable

Book club community app Fable 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 (since they’re both owned by Scribd), which gives access to 1.5 million ebooks and audiobooks from the major publishers and more. Your ratings and reviews are then synced to Fable, where you can also see the recommendations of others and join virtual book clubs. Goodreads who?

To be fair, 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 are even more! We really have a ton of choices in this space, so why not just download them all?

Fable: iOS/Android

Medallion

Locket is one of the pioneers behind the idea of ​​putting your friends directly on your iPhone’s home screen. The social app offers a live widget that updates as your friends upload new photos or messages that you can reply to via a light chat option. You can also participate in weekly photo dumps, follow your favorite artists and more.

Medallion: iOS/Android

AirPods

Apple and Spotify never got social networks built around music right, but AirPods seem to have. The app is a social network where you share what you stream with your friends and then builds on top of 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’ recently streamed songs, send messages to friends, set up your profile with favorite bands, or participate in music-related activities like music quizzes, get your music style toasted, or find out which friend has matching music tastes, to name a few.

AirPods: iOS/Android

The Mall

Newly launched app The Mall turns online shopping into a social experience. The app offers a universal feed to follow updates and new releases from your favorite brands, primarily fashion – although you can add others who have an online e-commerce store. Plus, you can visit friends’ profiles to see what kind of items are in their collections and “mall” and get inspiration and recommendations of other brands you might like based on your taste and style.

The Mall: iOS (waiting list)

Shelf

Shelf’s central idea is to offer you a way to organize your tastes – meaning the music, movies, TV shows, books and other things you’re into. By doing so, Shelf allows you to learn more about yourself, get personalized summaries, dive into trend breakdowns and more. But here, too, a social element comes into play, because you can browse your friends’ shelves as sources of discovery and inspiration. Plus, unlike many of the traditional social media platforms, Shelf is private by default because it’s not about gaining traction; it’s about keeping a story about your own digital life and interests, and those of your friends.

Shelf: iOS