Social Media Alternatives

About this site

Not a list of look-alikes

This is a directory of products that change the shape of staying in touch: a group letter that arrives by email once a month, a private circle with no audience, a trip your friends can follow, a postcard that takes a week, an app whose whole job is to get you to a table with people you like. What you will not find is a feed with a different logo, or a copy of Instagram with better manners.

A feed is built to hold your attention. Everything here is built to hand it back.

How we pick

The big apps are hard to put down by design. The features that keep you scrolling have names, and researchers, regulators and the US Surgeon General have written them down.1, 2, 3 The endless feed, autoplay, the pull to refresh, the like count, the streak, the notification timed to bring you back. Each one is a small, deliberate tug on your attention, and they add up.

That list is our filter. Every feature on it is a reason not to list a product. Here are the six things we look for instead. Few products manage all six, so each card marks where a product falls short, and we hold our own product to the same six. Under each one, "On the card" says which row it becomes and what a tick, a tilde and a cross mean there.

  1. Careful with your attention

    Nothing here is built to keep you watching. No infinite scroll, no autoplay, no feed ranked by whatever holds you longest. When researchers asked YouTube users what left them feeling in control, the answer was choosing what came next; autoplay and recommendations did the opposite.4 A letter has a last page. A shared album has a last photo. You reach the end, and the app lets you go.

    On the card: Feed. Is there a feed, and what shape is it?

    • No feed, or a private chronological one for a group you chose. None · Private, in order
    • Chronological but public, or with a discover or explore surface. Public, in order · With a discover page
    • Ranked, or endless by design. Ranked

  2. For the people you actually know

    Ask people who they would turn to in a crisis and the answer is a handful. Ask who they count as close friends and it is a dozen or so. Hundreds of followers do not change that: online circles turn out to be no bigger than offline ones.5 That inner ring is what these products are built for. You invite people by name. No public profile, no follower count, no audience to perform for. And in the study that sorted Facebook contact by kind, what went with feeling better was not likes. It was hearing from people close to you, in words they wrote for you.6

    On the card: Audience. Who can see what you share?

    • You invite people by name; no public profile. People you invite
    • Followers you accept, but a public profile. Followers you accept
    • Public profiles; anyone can follow. Anyone

  3. Slow on purpose

    A monthly edition. A postcard that takes a week. A letter you write in one sitting. Here, delay is the feature. When the next one is weeks away there is nothing to check, and checking is the habit the big apps are built around: the automatic pick-up, the "just one more".4, 7 The European Commission now asks platforms to add friction of this kind for young users, "giving users an opportunity to think".3 And a slow letter lands well: people who write a letter of thanks underestimate how glad the person receiving it will be.8

    On the card: Pace. How often does it arrive?

    • Editions or a schedule: monthly, weekly, per issue. Monthly · Weekly · You set the schedule
    • Whenever, but built for answering later; or per trip. Per trip · Whenever
    • As it happens. As it happens

  4. Nothing to count

    No likes, no view counts, no streaks, no read receipts. Numbers turn friendship into a scoreboard, and a scoreboard invites you to compare yourself with everyone else. When economists traced what Facebook's arrival did to students' mental health, comparison was the likeliest explanation.9 The European Commission now lists likes, streaks and read receipts among the features platforms should switch off by default for young users.3 Without them, the only measure left is whether you enjoyed what arrived.

    On the card: Likes. What gets counted: likes, followers, views, streaks?

    • Nothing counted. Nothing counted
    • Reactions, likes or read receipts, with no public score. Reactions, no counts · Read receipts · Reactions and read receipts
    • Public likes, followers or views, or streaks. Public counts · Streaks

  5. Gets out of the way

    Notifications you asked for, or none. Where the goal is meeting up, the product ends with you leaving it: a table booked, a walk arranged, an envelope in the post. What comes next is better than you expect. In experiments, people underestimated how good an ordinary conversation would feel, with a stranger on the train or an old friend on the phone.10, 11 And when one large experiment paid people to leave Facebook for a month, they got back about an hour a day, some of it spent with friends and family, some of it watching television alone.12

    On the card: Notifications. What does it send you, and can you turn it off?

    • None, or only the ones you choose per type, with a switch. None · Email only · Only the ones you choose
    • Reminders, nudges or activity alerts by default. Reminders by default · Activity alerts by default
    • Timed to bring you back. Built to pull you back

  6. You know who pays

    An app funded by ads is paid for your attention, so it has a reason to keep you there.7, 13 A product here is paid for in a way you can see: by you or someone in your circle, by selling something you can hold, like a printed book, or by volunteers' time. Every listing says what it costs and who pays. This site answers the same question: it is run by Leaning House, which makes one of the products listed. Who runs it says how we mark that.

    On the card: Pricing. What it costs, price first, in the product's own unit.

    The price first, in the product's own unit, then who pays. Stated, never marked: how a product is paid for is a fact, not a verdict.

  • The one exception. Open feeds like Mastodon are still feeds: there is no last page. When one is listed it goes in a category of its own, with that caveat, for people who want a public timeline without the ranking.
  • What we do not claim. Whether social media as a whole harms wellbeing is still argued over,1 and the average effects in the big studies are small.12, 14 We do not claim that switching apps will change your life. We claim something smaller: that products built to hand your attention back are a better bet than products built to take it, and that you should know the difference before you choose.

The easiest way to feel the difference is to try one. Pick one person you miss and one product from the list, and give it a month.

See what made the list

Who runs it

Disclosure

The site is made and maintained by Leaning House, a small company in Amsterdam. Leaning House also makes DearAll, a monthly email catch-up for private circles, and DearAll is listed in this directory. Its card is pinned to the top of the results it matches and carries an Our product label, so you always know when we are recommending ourselves.

Contact: support@leaninghouse.co.

What we check

  • Facts (price, platforms, where it is based, whether it is open source) come from the product's official site, pricing page, legal page or app-store listing. Never from opinion.
  • Every listing shows the month its facts were last checked and, under "More", the pages they were read on.
  • Every card marks where a product falls short, ours included, and says the trade-off in words under "More".
  • No affiliate links, no paid placements. Nobody can pay to be listed or to rank higher.
  • Discontinued products are removed as soon as we notice.

Wrong price, dead link, product we missed? Tell us. Corrections go live as soon as they are verified.

How the articles are written

Articles cite peer-reviewed research, public institutions and reputable press, in that order. Nothing is cited from memory: a source is used only after we have opened it and seen the figures in the text, caveats included. Where the evidence is weak or contested, the article says so. Each article shows when it was published and, if it has changed since, when it was updated, and ends with its sources. This page follows the same rule.

Sources

  1. Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, "Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory", U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023, pp. 4 and 9. The design features are on p. 9; the advisory's own caveat on the evidence is on p. 4. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-health-social-media-advisory.pdf
  2. Alberto Monge Roffarello, Kai Lukoff and Luigi De Russis, "Defining and Identifying Attention Capture Deceptive Designs in Digital Interfaces", Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2023, pp. 1-19, doi:10.1145/3544548.3580729. A systematic review of 43 papers; the eleven patterns are in Table 4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580729
  3. European Commission, "Guidelines on measures to ensure a high level of privacy, safety and security for minors online, pursuant to Article 28(4) of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065", 14 July 2025 (Official Journal C/2025/5519), paragraphs 57(b) and 61(b). Guidance, not binding law, for platforms used by minors. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-publishes-guidelines-protection-minors
  4. Kai Lukoff, Ulrik Lyngs, Himanshu Zade, J. Vera Liao, James Choi, Kaiyue Fan, Sean A. Munson and Alexis Hiniker, "How the Design of YouTube Influences User Sense of Agency", Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2021, pp. 1-17, doi:10.1145/3411764.3445467. A survey of 120 US users of one app plus 13 co-design sessions. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445467
  5. R. I. M. Dunbar, "Do online social media cut through the constraints that limit the size of offline social networks?", Royal Society Open Science 3, 2016, 150292, doi:10.1098/rsos.150292 (open access). Two UK samples; the inner layers average 4.1 and 13.6 people. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150292
  6. Moira Burke and Robert E. Kraut, "The Relationship Between Facebook Use and Well-Being Depends on Communication Type and Tie Strength", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21(4), 2016, 265-281, doi:10.1111/jcc4.12162 (open access). A panel of 1,910 Facebook users with server logs; Burke was a Facebook researcher. The authors call the effects modest and note that only an experiment can rule out self-selection. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12162
  7. Ulrik Lyngs, Kai Lukoff, Petr Slovak, Reuben Binns, Adam Slack, Michael Inzlicht, Max Van Kleek and Nigel Shadbolt, "Self-Control in Cyberspace: Applying Dual Systems Theory to a Review of Digital Self-Control Tools", Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2019, pp. 1-18, doi:10.1145/3290605.3300361. A review of 367 self-control tools plus a theoretical model. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300361
  8. Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, "Undervaluing Gratitude: Expressers Misunderstand the Consequences of Showing Appreciation", Psychological Science 29(9), 2018, 1423-1435, doi:10.1177/0956797618772506. Three experiments with letters of thanks; the first was 107 MBA students. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618772506
  9. Luca Braghieri, Ro'ee Levy and Alexey Makarin, "Social Media and Mental Health", American Economic Review 112(11), 2022, 3660-3693, doi:10.1257/aer.20211218. The staggered arrival of Facebook at 775 US colleges; an effect of 0.085 standard deviations on an index of poor mental health. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20211218
  10. Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, "Mistakenly Seeking Solitude", Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(5), 2014, 1980-1999, doi:10.1037/a0037323. Chicago commuters on trains and buses; modest samples. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037323
  11. Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, "It's surprisingly nice to hear you: Misunderstanding the impact of communication media can lead to suboptimal choices of how to connect with others", Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 150(3), 2021, 595-607, doi:10.1037/xge0000962. The first experiment asked 200 students to reconnect with an old friend by phone or email. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000962
  12. Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer and Matthew Gentzkow, "The Welfare Effects of Social Media", American Economic Review 110(3), 2020, 629-676, doi:10.1257/aer.20190658. A randomised experiment with 1,661 US Facebook users before the 2018 midterms; the authors call the well-being effects small. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20190658
  13. Christian Montag, Bernd Lachmann, Marc Herrlich and Katharina Zweig, "Addictive Features of Social Media/Messenger Platforms and Freemium Games against the Background of Psychological and Economic Theories", International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16(14), 2019, 2612, doi:10.3390/ijerph16142612 (open access). The authors describe the paper as theoretical. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16142612
  14. Amy Orben and Andrew K. Przybylski, "The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use", Nature Human Behaviour 3, 2019, 173-182, doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1. Three datasets, 355,358 adolescents; the association is negative but explains at most 0.4% of the variation in well-being. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0506-1