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

Instagram has a well-documented problem with how it treats teenage users, and Meta is finally taking a more concrete step to address it. The company announced it is testing a new feature on Instagram designed to stop teens from being repeatedly served the same type of content in Explore, Feed, and Reels.

The announcement is part of a broader global rollout of tightened teen account protections across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger.

The evidence against Instagram’s algorithm has been building for years

Researchers set up fake teen profiles on Instagram and found that liking just one fitness-related post was enough to completely change what the algorithm recommended next. The Explore tab quickly filled up with weight-loss tips, extreme dieting content, and images of heavily edited body types. The pattern repeated across profiles mimicking teenagers of different ages and genders.

According to Harvard researchers, Instagram’s algorithm actively draws vulnerable teens into a damaging cycle of negative social comparison, worsening body image, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

Most damningly, Facebook’s own internal research found that 32% of teen girls said Instagram made them feel worse about their bodies when they were already struggling. The platform knew this and kept going.

What Meta is doing to protect teens from harmful content

Meta acknowledges that content around nutrition, fitness, or coping with anxiety can be useful, but argues it should be balanced rather than served on repeat. The new feature being tested is specifically aimed at breaking that loop.

Separately, the 13+ content setting, first launched last October, is now expanding globally across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. Nine out of ten teens have stayed within that setting since launch.

An independent assessment by online safety firm Alice found that teens in the default 13+ setting saw 68% less mature content than on a leading competitor’s teen experience. Those in the stricter Limited Content setting saw 96% less.

Meta also crowdsourced feedback from hundreds of thousands of parents who rated over 15 million pieces of content. In a survey at the end of April, fewer than 2% of posts were flagged as inappropriate by most parents. The stricter Limited Content setting is also coming to Facebook and Messenger later this year.

Meta is testing a new “Series” feature for Reels that’s designed to make it easier to keep up with serialized content on Instagram and Facebook, the company told TechCrunch.

Select creators will now be able to create a series using their Reels, both new and old. Each Reel will become an episode in a bigger story with a dedicated hub on their profile, mirroring an experience that’s already available on TikTok.

The launch of the new feature indicates that Meta is embracing longer-term viewing, rather than quick scrolling sessions, as is normally the case with short-form videos. With organized series, the social media giant is looking to bring audiences back repeatedly and build stronger viewing habits. As for creators, the new feature offers a more organized way to release episodic videos, like tutorials and challenges.

Meta told TechCrunch that it’s considering ways to monetize the new feature, but didn’t share specifics on what that could look like.

It’s worth noting that Instagram rival TikTok launched a Series feature back in 2023, allowing creators to post collections of premium content behind a paywall that viewers can purchase for access. It’s possible that Meta could follow a similar playbook with its own series feature in the future.

Meta says it’s already seeing serialized content take off, so its newest test feature is meant to make it simpler to catch every episode. For example, if a creator is doing a “10 days of healthier baking” series, they can bundle all ten videos into a single series. The series would appear in a new tab on the creator’s profile with its own page so people can find all the episodes, watch them in order, and pick up where they left off.

When viewers discover episodes of a series while scrolling their feed or the Reels tab, they will see the option to tap into the full series to see other episodes. Users also have the option to save a series to watch later or stay up-to-date.

For the testing phase, Meta is working with select creators and content producers who have already shared serialized content on Instagram and Facebook.

Meta is taking its “13+” content settings for Teen Accounts global. The company said today that the setting, which it likens to a movie rating, will now apply by default to teenagers across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger worldwide, extending a system it first introduced last October in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. According to Meta, nine in ten teens have stayed in the default setting since that launch rather than seeking to change it.

The idea is to shape what shows up for a teen by default. On Facebook, the new 13+ setting is designed to hide content Meta deems inappropriate for teens in Feed and Reels, and to limit teens’ interactions with Profiles, Pages, Groups, and Events that mostly post such material.

On Messenger, it restricts teens from opening links to that content or chatting with accounts that primarily share it on Facebook. A stricter option called Limited Content, already available on Instagram, is due to arrive on Facebook and Messenger later this year.

Meta has leaned on parents to calibrate what “appropriate” means. The company says hundreds of thousands of parents have rated more than 15 million pieces of content, and that in its most recent survey at the end of April, covering parents in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada reviewing recommended Facebook posts, fewer than 2% were judged inappropriate for teens by most parents.

The framing draws on the Motion Picture Association’s public guidelines, though Meta is careful to note that the MPA is not rating or endorsing any of its content.

Alongside the rollout, Meta said it is testing a way to stop teens being served the same kind of post over and over on Instagram. Content about nutrition, weightlifting, or coping with anxiety can be useful, the company said, but is better balanced than shown repeatedly, so it is trialling limits on how many such posts appear in a row in Explore, Feed, and Reels.

It is a quiet acknowledgement that the problem with a recommendation engine is not only what it surfaces once but what it surfaces relentlessly.

To check its own work, Meta commissioned Alice, a safety firm formerly known as ActiveFence, to run adversarial testing against the settings. By Alice’s account, Instagram Teen Accounts in the default mode saw 68% less mature content than an unnamed competitor’s teen experience, rising to 96% less in the stricter Limited Content mode.

The assessment flagged two gaps, including that “car surfing,” a newer viral trend, was not yet restricted the way “subway surfing” already was. Meta said it updated its policies and that the fixes were retested before publication.

The expansion lands against years of pressure on Meta over how its apps affect young users, from the shelving of an “Instagram Kids” project to a steady drip of teen-safety features. The figures and the favourable audit are Meta’s own, and the company frames the announcement as progress. Whether parents, regulators, and the teens themselves agree is the part no press release decides.

Instagram has fixed a scary security flaw that allowed hackers to take over accounts using Meta’s own AI support chatbot. The issue came to light over the weekend, when multiple users on Reddit and X reported that their accounts had been compromised. 

Even my Instagram account got hacked

The password got changed without my knowledge and I was getting different password reset attempts throughout yesterday. And I got repeatedly logged out from the IG iOS app

Quite concerning https://t.co/F6wjKYrlBo

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) June 1, 2026

As reported by TechCrunch, security researcher Jane Wong was also among those affected. “The password got changed without my knowledge, and I was getting different password reset attempts throughout yesterday,” she said. “Quite concerning.”

How did the hack work?

A video posted on X showed the entire process, and it’s alarming in how simple it was. The hacker first used a VPN to spoof the location, bypassing Instagram’s automated account protections. Then, they opened a chat with Meta’s AI Support Assistant and simply asked the bot to add a new email address to the target’s account.

Instagram had an exploit that allowed you to use Meta AI to reset passwords to accounts with no MFA on them. The exploit was patched a short time ago.pic.twitter.com/PEUwLvmllj

— Dark Web Informer (@DarkWebInformer) June 1, 2026

Here’s where it gets wild. The chatbot sent a verification code to the hacker’s email, not the victim’s. The hacker shared the code back with the chatbot, which then offered a button to reset the password. That’s how easy it was to take over the account of anyone on Instagram. 

TechCrunch verified that the hacker’s public email mailbox did receive the verification code, confirming the attack worked exactly as shown.

Is your account at risk?

The scariest part of this attack is that the hacker never needed access to the victim’s real email address at any point. The entire process bypassed the actual account owner completely.

Instagram spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed on Monday that the issue has now been fixed. However, it remains unclear how many users had their accounts compromised before the patch. So, the good news is that you don’t have to worry about this issue anymore.

The state of AI in support

The rising prices of consumer electronics, the growing ease with which fraudsters can deceive people, and the challenges universities face as students use AI to cheat are just some examples of how AI has made our lives worse.

For me, the most annoying application of AI is in support chats. I recently ordered dinner, which was delayed. The AI support chat didn’t let me talk to a human for about two hours, repeatedly telling me that the food would arrive in the next 10 minutes. 

Before this was implemented, any query I had was resolved in minutes by a human customer service agent. Meta’s AI support chatbot is yet another example of how allowing AI in customer service is creating unnecessary stress for users.

Instagram has resolved a security issue that allowed several users’ accounts to get hacked. The attack appeared to rely on tricking Meta’s own AI-powered support chatbot into granting access to a victim’s account.

Over the weekend, several users on Reddit claimed that their Instagram accounts had been compromised, and a number of users on X warned of similar account hijackings. The compromised accounts include the Instagram handle for the Obama-era White House, which appears to have been inactive since 2017; and the account of the U.S. Space Force’s chief master sergeant John Bentivegna.

Security researcher Jane Wong said her Instagram account was also taken over. 

“The password got changed without my knowledge and I was getting different password reset attempts throughout yesterday,” said Wong. “Quite concerning.” 

A video posted on X showed the step-by-step process to hack someone’s Instagram account. The hacker allegedly used a VPN to spoof the targets’ presumed location to avoid triggering Instagram’s automated account protections. Then, the hacker opened a chat with Meta AI Support Assistant and asked the bot to add a new email address to the target’s account. The chatbot can be seen sending a verification code to the email address provided by the hacker; the hacker then shares the verification code with the chatbot, which prompts the chatbot to show a button to “Reset Password.” The hacker enters a new password and takes over the victim’s account. 

TechCrunch was able to verify that the hacker’s public email mailbox, which was displayed in the video, effectively received the verification code. 

The attack relied on the fact that at no point the hacker had to take over the legitimate email address linked to the victims’ Instagram account. 

On Monday, Instagram spokesperson Andy Stone said in a reply to Wong’s post and others that the issue was now fixed. It’s unclear how many Instagram users had their accounts improperly accessed.

Meta did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Hackers hijacked Instagram accounts over the weekend by tricking Meta’s own AI-powered support chatbot into granting them access. The attack required no access to the victim’s email, no phishing link, and no malware. The hacker simply asked the chatbot to add a new email address to someone else’s account.

A video posted on X showed the step-by-step process. The hacker used a VPN to spoof the target’s presumed location, avoiding Instagram’s automated account protections. They then opened a chat with Meta AI Support Assistant and asked the bot to add a new email address to the target’s account.

The chatbot sent a verification code to the hacker’s email address. The hacker shared the code back with the chatbot. The bot then displayed a “Reset Password” button. The hacker entered a new password and took over the account.

At no point did the hacker need to access the legitimate email address linked to the victim’s Instagram account. TechCrunch verified that the hacker’s public email mailbox, displayed in the video, received the verification code. The attack exploited a fundamental flaw: the AI chatbot treated the person it was talking to as the account owner without verifying their identity.

The compromised accounts included the Obama-era White House Instagram handle, which had been inactive since 2017, and the account of US Space Force Chief Master Sergeant John Bentivegna. Security researcher Jane Wong said her account was also taken over.

“The password got changed without my knowledge and I was getting different password reset attempts throughout yesterday,” Wong said. “Quite concerning.” Multiple users on Reddit and X reported similar hijackings over the same weekend.

Instagram spokesperson Andy Stone said on Monday that the issue was fixed. It is unclear how many accounts were compromised. Meta did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

The attack is a textbook example of why deploying AI chatbots with account-level permissions is dangerous. Salesforce’s Agentforce customers have been reluctant to let AI agents take financially meaningful actions precisely because of this risk. Analyst Rebecca Wettemann described the fear as “the AI running off in the middle of the night and refunding a bunch of transactions.” Meta gave its AI the ability to reset passwords, and the AI did exactly what it was asked to do, for the wrong person.

The AI agent security landscape is producing new categories of vulnerability faster than companies can address them. OpenClaw’s Claw Chain exploit weaponised an agent’s own sandbox privileges. This Instagram attack weaponised an AI support bot’s account management privileges. The common thread: when an AI agent has the authority to act, the security of the system depends entirely on whether the agent can verify who is asking it to act.

The Meta AI Support Assistant was designed to reduce the cost of human customer service. It succeeded at that. It also created an attack surface that human support agents would not have: a human agent would have verified the caller’s identity before adding a new email to an account. The chatbot did not.

This is the third high-profile AI deployment failure in a single week. Starbucks scrapped its AI inventory system after nine months of miscounts. Waymo’s flood recall failed within two weeks. Meta’s AI chatbot gave hackers the keys to Instagram accounts. The pattern is consistent: AI systems deployed at scale fail in ways their designers did not anticipate, and the failures are more consequential than the efficiencies they were built to deliver.