Beyond Instagram: Introducing the next generation of social apps
SMRTR summary
Big Tech's grip on social media may finally be loosening. A wave of scrappy startups is reimagining how we connect online, and the alternatives are surprisingly compelling.
There's Retro, a photo-sharing app built by former Instagram insiders that keeps things intimate. Corner describes itself as "Google Maps but social," letting users curate lists of favorite places. Divine is a full-on Vine resurrection, complete with the original archive of 500,000 videos, backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's nonprofit.
Music lovers have Airbuds, which does what Apple and Spotify never quite could, turning listening into a shared social experience. Book lovers have Fable, now bundled with access to 1.5 million ebooks. And for those fleeing X, Indigo lets you post to both Mastodon and Bluesky simultaneously.
What these apps share is a deliberate smallness, prioritizing community and personality over scale and algorithmic noise. Whether any of them can survive long-term remains an open question. But right now, they're worth exploring.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to TechCrunch.
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