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 taking aim at these giants by building new, often smaller and more personal social networking experiences to connect people with friends, interests, and tighter-knit communities.

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

Below are some of our favorites, all of which are worth a download.

Retro

Retro is a thoughtfully designed photo-sharing app focused on building connections 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 that help you reconnect with your own memories. You can select certain photos to highlight every 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 most recent month’s worth of photos.

Cosmos

Are you the creative type who’s sick of the AI slop on Pinterest? Another app, Cosmos, could offer an escape. Dubbed a “space for inspiration,” Cosmos allows you to search by color, keyword, or image, to shape a profile based on your taste. 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 it can also be used to shop for interesting products that match your style.

Indigo

Looking to get off 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 participate in both networks at once. The app offers a unified timeline and a composer that lets you cross-post to both services at once, access to your custom feeds, and tons of personalization tools and configuration settings. The app has some polish, having been co-created by Ben McCarthy, who also developed the Obscura line of apps and others, alongside freelance iOS designer Aaron Vegh.

Indigo: iOS only

Corner

Corner says it best, calling its app “Google Maps but social,” which is an apt description. The company has a growing community of some 125,000+ users who curate their favorite places both locally and abroad into lists that they can “gatekeep” or make 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 uncover unique lists, like those focused on where you can find the best dumplings, queer nightlife, live jazz spots, places to dance that aren’t clubs, indie bookshops, and anything else you want to categorize, organize, and recommend. The app also provides a personalized map where you can view your favorite places, those 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 offer a home for short-form video creators. The app hosts roughly 500,000 videos from nearly 100,000 original Vine creators and allows users to make their own six-second videos once again. Several early Vine creators have returned to the app, as well, like 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, “and Other Stuff,” which aims to back open source social projects.

Mesh

While not exactly a social network in the sense that it’s a platform for connecting directly, Mesh is a helpful tool to throw into your lineup of networking apps. The app is something like an address book on steroids, as it lets you track what people in your network — personal, professional, and otherwise — have been up to, by tracking LinkedIn or X bio changes, posts, publications, and more. Plus, Mesh provides tools allowing you to reach out and reconnect on a cadence you configure, somewhat like a personal CRM. Acquired by WordPress.com owner Automattic in 2025 (when it was then known as Clay), Mesh plans to offer deeper integrations with Automattic’s universal messaging app, Beeper — which, by the way, you should download too.

Fable

Book club community app Fable recently got an upgrade that makes it worth another look, even if it’s not your main book tracker. The company is now offering a bundled service with digital reading subscription provider Everand (as they’re both owned by Scribd), which offers access to 1.5 million ebooks and audiobooks from the major publishers and more. Your ratings and reviews then sync over to Fable, where you can also see the recommendations from 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 truly have a wealth of choices in this space, so why not just download them all?

Locket

Locket is one of the pioneers of the idea to put 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, which you can respond to through a lightweight chat option. You can also engage in weekly photo dumps, follow your favorite artists, and more.

Airbuds

Apple and Spotify never got social networks built around music right, but Airbuds seems to have done it. The app is a social network where you share what you’re streaming with your friends, 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, message friends, configure your profile with favorite bands, or engage in music-related activities like music quizzes, getting your music style roasted, or finding out which friend has matching musical taste, to name a few.

The Mall

Newly launched app The Mall turns online shopping into a social experience. The app offers a universal feed for following updates and new releases from your favorite brands, largely fashion — though you can add others that have an online e-commerce storefront. Plus, you can visit friends’ profiles to see what sort of items are in their collections and “mall” and get inspiration and recommendations of other brands you might like, based on your tastes and style.

The Mall: iOS (waitlist)

Shelf

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

Shelf: iOS