FRIENDS

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how noisy social media has become. My feed is constantly full of creators I’ve never met, influencers trying to show us some perfectly curated page, or worse, advertise some sort of service — if I have to hear about the Revolut card one more time.

This contrasts pretty starkly with what social media was originally intended for, in the times of MySpace or Friendster. As the name suggests, social media was just a space for people to connect and share bits of their lives with their friends. Somewhere along the way, that whole idea of sharing intimate moments with friends turned into curating your profile to show who visited the most number of Michelin restaurants.

These posts often emphasise only the most polished and idealised aspects of a person’s life, creating a distorted representation of reality.

The Friends app seeks to restore social media’s original purpose — a genuine connection with friends. Users see content exclusively from their friends, with no publicly visible follower or following counts to compete over.

The interface is super simple. One thing I’m really excited about is the board layout. Instead of the usual doomscrolling of an endless chronological feed optimised to keep you on the app, you’re presented with all your friends. In order to see what they’ve added, you enter your friend’s space, almost like stepping into their room. This design prevents overwhelming feeds and ensures that every interaction is intentional.

Each person gets a blank canvas they can arrange however they want. Instead of a rigid grid view, you can have a scrapbook, clean pastel aesthetic or a chaotic collage of random moments. Memories aren’t perfectly linear, so why force them to be? This builds more of a personal consciousness for each person.

This might be my favourite part. To add someone, you actually have to scan their nametag on their device. No usernames to search and no random requests from bot accounts. If someone is on your Friends app, it’s because you’ve met them face-to-face.

Instead of likes or comments, you interact with your friends using stickers you can place anywhere. Kind of like decorating a piece of work. Little doodles, icons and emojis — just like we used to decorate things with actual stickers or pass notes in class with post-it notes. It makes the whole experience feel lighter and more personal, no need for the “You look cute!” comment every time a friend posts something.

And that’s my idea for a different kind of social network. If you like it, you might want to try out my Figma prototype.

Some scenery images used in the prototype belong to Ian Kobylanski, KingShiekh12*, Miranda Frangou, Ben Hershey. Also while I did use ChatGPT to generate profile images, I typed this mostly on my own — I just naturally use lots of em dashes.

March 10, 2025