The idea of breaking away from major social media platforms has gained traction within the past few years. With more and more studies demonstrating the harms of extensive social media usage– with the developers of these platforms even acknowledging the damage their sites can do – it almost seems like there is no way to escape. Sure, you can just delete your accounts, but then there’s a good chance you’ll either miss out on valuable information or your friends will be upset with you for it; both are undesirable outcomes. However, there has been a growing movement to jump ship to platforms that advertise themselves as simpler or less cluttered than mainstream social media sites. Apps such as BeReal, SpaceHey and Lapse, which is invite only as of publishing, were all founded on this premise. Streamlined apps are an interesting concept, but at the end of the day, are these solving anything?
Not even close.
All three of these apps have a lot in common: they were all start-ups that exploded in popularity almost out of nowhere, built on the premise of being different from the platform giants they want to dethrone. They also all indulge in some sort of nostalgia-bait as a way to try and grab potential user’s attention. Ruby Keeler of online news platform Culted described BeReal as “Instagram’s intentionally ugly step-sister,” while Jared Newman of business magazine Fast Company paints SpaceHey as a “shameless MySpace clone.” Lapse, however, is designed to mimic the moment of taking pictures on a point and shoot film camera on your phone, grainy and overexposed digital filter included. It is not as though these apps are obscure either; according to web analytics firm Similarweb, BeReal alone has 3 million active users as of Sept. 2023. The concepts of these apps are enticing and, admittedly, I still tap the daily notification from BeReal reminding me that it is “time to BeReal.” However, these apps do not give me the feeling that they are an escape from social media at all. They desperately cling onto this social media underdog image: Lapse’s own about page states that “social media giants compel us to curate our lives for likes from strangers and to compete with friends for followers. We’ve been so caught up in that game, we forgot the real reason we signed up in the first place.”
The problem is, these platforms have all started to mimic those that they want to topple.
While BeReal was originally meant for pictures to be shared only with close friends, they later introduced the “Friends of Friends” feature, which is like Instagram’s “Discover” page. Lapse prizes itself on being the best way to escape algorithms and the social media of today, yet at the same time forces users to send out invites to their contacts and rewards creators with high numbers of likes and followers. Simply put, these features don’t add up with their apparent goals. SpaceHey does not advertise itself as radically different from other social media apps like the other two platforms in question, however its entire existence is an attempt to copy MySpace. The company does try to act like being on SpaceHey is better than larger platforms, but I fail to see how. Not only are these startups just copying the very platforms they want to be better than, but it does not make sense to say that the way to escape social media platforms is to use another social media platform.
The real solution? Ditch all of it. If you’re invited to some new social media website that claims to be better than TikTok or Instagram, be wary. Not only is it likely just going to become a poorly done clone of a well-known platform, but it will also likely lose steam in just a few months and then become yet another website that is at risk of being hacked. Please, don’t sign up for a social media startup just because it’s getting news coverage at the moment.
