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.

Retro: iOS/Android

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.

Cosmos: iOS/Android

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.

Divine: iOS/Android/Web

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.

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 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?

Fable: iOS/Android

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.

Locket: iOS/Android

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.

Airbuds: iOS/Android

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

Nearly three months after its debut, Apple’s MacBook Neo is emerging as an early success story, helping the Cupertino company reach new customers and challenging long-held assumptions about who buys a Mac.

Apple shipped 1.1 million MacBook Neo units in the quarter ended March, according to data from market intelligence provider IDC, shared with TechCrunch, ahead of the recent MacBook Air (M5) and MacBook Pro (M5) launches. Those MacBooks shipped over 900,000 and 550,000 units, respectively, in their debut quarters.

The figure is notable because the Neo was available for only about three weeks during the quarter after going on sale in mid-March, said Navkendar Singh, associate vice president at IDC, adding that shipments began to spike from early April.

Introduced in early March with a starting price of $599, roughly 45% below the entry-level MacBook Air, the MacBook Neo was designed to make the Mac more accessible to a broader set of buyers. The laptop retains much of the look and feel of Apple’s premium notebooks, including an aluminum chassis and a 13-inch Liquid Retina display, while making some compromises to reach the lower price point, including using an A18 Pro chip instead of an M-series processor and offering 8GB of memory in the base model.

So far, the market appears to be responding to Apple’s strategy. Demand for the Neo, Singh said, has exceeded expectations in several countries, including India, where retailers have struggled to secure enough inventory.

Of the MacBook Neo units shipped globally during the March quarter, 44% were shipped to the U.S., per IDC. India, meanwhile, accounted for close to 18,000 shipments despite the laptop being available for only a few weeks during the period.

The MacBook Neo starts at ₹69,900 (about $733) in India, compared with ₹119,900 (around $1,260) for the entry-level MacBook Air.

“Rising prices of Windows notebooks and attractive pricing of the Neo have led to its very high demand,” Singh told TechCrunch.

The Neo’s popularity could also reshape Apple’s strategy in markets such as India, where older MacBook models such as the M1, M2, and M3 Air have historically been important volume drivers when sold at discounted prices during sales events, according to IDC senior market analyst Bharath Shenoy.

“We need to see how that pans out going ahead due to Neo’s rising popularity,” Singh said.

Speaking during Apple’s April earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said customer response to the MacBook Neo had been “off the charts” and acknowledged that the company was facing supply constraints following the launch. Cook also said Apple had set a March-quarter record for customers new to the Mac, partly driven by the Neo.

Counterpoint Research sees the significance of the Neo extending beyond its early sales. The laptop is helping Apple expand beyond its traditional customer base by attracting first-time Mac buyers and competing in lower-priced notebook segments where Macs have historically had little presence, said David Naranjo, associate director at the research firm.

He added that the Neo could eventually help Apple increase its share of the $400-$699 notebook market from about 2% to around 15%.

“Although it is still early, the MacBook Neo launch stands out as one of Apple’s most strategically important recent Mac releases, especially as the wider PC market deals with rising memory costs and ‘shrinkflation,’ while Apple is expanding its reach,” Naranjo told TechCrunch.

IDC’s Singh believes the opportunity extends beyond first-time buyers. Apple, he said, is targeting the Neo at a much broader audience than previous Mac models, a strategy that could help the company gain share in consumer and small-business laptop segments.

The MacBook Neo’s early success is already prompting competitors to respond. Dell this week unveiled a new XPS 13, starting at $699, aimed at the same segment, and said the MacBook Neo’s arrival had demonstrated strong demand for premium-quality laptops at more accessible prices.

That said, the launch-quarter figures may tell only part of the story, with Singh forecasting a “very big spike” in Neo shipments in the current quarter as Apple works through supply constraints and expands availability.

Apple did not respond to a request for comments.