The Future of Social Media

New Platforms Are Rising Up to Challenge the Giants

Arteen Zahiri

Published in

Start-up Society

9 min readJul 31, 2023

Welcome to the 116th edition of Start-up Society! Check out the previous issue, if you have not already, here!

Remember when you asked for like 10 different social media apps? Neither do we, but as social media innovation explodes there will be tons of excitement and fierce debate over where the next trend will exist. Getting so personal as to inspire Elon to challenge Zuck, not only to a Colosseum fight, but also to a literal dick measuring competition.

All jokes aside, there is something interesting happening, between Threads teasing the use of ActivityPub (which also powers Mastodon) to enable deeper network interactions with the Fediverse, Elon attempting to keep Twitter (now X.com) as the town square of the internet, and Jack touting Bluesky as a Web5 alternative to Twitter. These are all of the same thread, i.e. mainly text-based social media formats. Twitter, Blueskey, Threads, and Mastodon are all competing with each other. The idea of opening up the social network itself (albeit still in the “Twitter” format) is not only being pioneered by ActivityPub, but also by Lens Protocol — a blockchain-based social network focused on popularizing social graphs. Newer formats from other popular technology influencers have also appeared, like Airchat, which seems to be picking up the ball that Clubhouse dropped.

Okay, so we’ve listed quite a few apps here. Let’s spend some time on 2 that are really cool, digging into their core components and teams to pass some judgment on why people are using them.

Airchat

HQ: Los Angeles, CA

Founded: 2019

Employees: 7 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Airchat is a push-to-talk, voice-first group messenger with perfect transcripts. What exactly does that mean? Our friends over at Pirate Wires broke it down:

Billed as “a dinner party in your pocket” in its teaser video, it looks like the app blends elements of Instagram stories (left-to-right tap-to-scroll), Snapchat (asynchronous content back-and-forth), Clubhouse (live audio), TikTok (vertical video that’s likable, sharable, commentable; filters), Twitter (short messages user can broadcast to a network that can be liked and commented on), and direct messaging, with AI-powered elements such as art and transcription and language translation.

That cleared it up! Alright fine, here’s the video:

Airchat has a self-moderation policy: users have powerful tools to fully moderate behavior on their content — tools that normally other platforms reserve for themselves.
On iOS, Airchat is presently accessible as a closed beta. Currently, the app is being developed on Android.
You can get on Airchat’s waitlist by signing up on their website or following them on Twitter. Once you get access, follow @arteenvibey and @room3ark

MEET THE TEAM

Airchat is founded by a duo so dynamic that they rival the likes of Michael Jordan & Scottie Pippen and Simon & Garfunkel. This isn’t their first collaboration either, these two previously worked together to launch Spearhead, a $100M+ early-stage fund that teaches founders the craft of angel investing. What makes them so special? We’ll let their resumes do the talking.

Naval Ravikant, Co-Founder

Naval is a legendary Indian-American entrepreneur and investor. In 1999, he co-founded Epinions — a consumer product review site — which merged with DealTime in 2003 to become Shopping.com, which was acquired by eBay in 2005.
Around 2007, Naval launched a $20 million early-stage venture capital fund named “The Hit Forge” which invested in prominent startups including Twitter, Uber, Postmates, and Stack Overflow.
In 2010, Naval co-founded AngelList, a platform for connecting startups with investors. He served as the company’s CEO until 2019. He is still the Chairman to this day.
Naval is also known for his insights on business, technology, and life. His tweets and blog posts have been widely read and shared.
Written by Eric Jorgenson in 2020, “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant” is a collection of Naval’s insights on business, technology, and life. The book has been praised for its wisdom and practical advice.
Naval graduated with degrees in Computer Science and Economics from Dartmouth College in 1995.

Brian Norgard, Co-Founder

As the former Chief Product Officer (2016–2018), Brian played a pivotal role in Tinder’s success, leading it to become the fastest-growing mobile company in consumer internet history. In less than 3 years, Tinder emerged as the top-grossing mobile app in the world, created over $50 billion dollars in shareholder value, and led to hundreds of millions of real-world connections.
Prior to Tinder, Brian founded Tappy, a mobile messaging application backed by Kleiner Perkins and acquired by Tinder.
Currently, Brian leads Nogard Capital. The VC firm has invested in several successful startups including Airtable, Alpaca, AngelList, Deel, Didi, Liquid Death, Lyft, Notion, Republic, SpaceX, StatMuse, and StockTwits.
At the age of 25, Brian became the youngest GM/VP in the history of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp after the acquisition of his first company, Newroo, where he served as the GM of MySpace News and FIM Labs.
In 2012, Brian built one of the fastest-growing Facebook applications in history (Chill), which reached over 30 million people.
Brian is a graduate of Brown University.

START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

The current social media platforms just aren’t designed for conversation. Most of them are broadcast media, and some of them are live. They don’t have the right privacy or moderation features, there’s too much censorship and top-down control.
I’ve invested in lots of social media platforms, and I’ve advised lots of them. I just got tired of talking to people and trying to convince them to do it my way. So, I just decided, I’ll do it.
Social media is focused on what media type it is addressing. Twitter is about short-form text, Instagram is about photos, and TikTok and YouTube are videos. Our model is about conversations. The best conversation you can possibly have with the most like-minded, easygoing person that you can find. — Naval Ravikant

Airchat breathes fresh life into the social media realm by prioritizing real conversations over passive content consumption. Naval’s passion and vision, combined with a strong focus on authenticity and user engagement, provide a promising recipe for success.
When it comes to making money, Airchat doesn’t consider it a priority. Their focus is currently on building a top-notch product and creating an engaged user base rather than rushing into monetization strategies. Naval says in an interview, “We don’t care about monetization. We’re a small team, it’s not expensive. We’ll make money. Social networks, when they win, they win really big.”
Naval is saying all the right things and he has a rockstar team in place solely focused on execution. But do people even want this? That’s not yet clear. Airchat’s success heavily relies on attracting a critical mass of users who value meaningful interactions over traditional one-way communication. Early user adoption and positive word-of-mouth will be crucial in building momentum.

GO DEEPER

Naval Launches Generative AI-based App Airchat that Resembles TikTok and Clubhouse

[EXCLUSIVE] NAVAL RAVIKANT’S AIRCHAT PLANS TO MAKE SOCIAL MEDIA AUTHENTIC AND FUN

What Is Airchat, the “Dinner Party in Your Pocket”?

Bluesky

HQ: Seattle, WA

Founded: 2019

Total Employees: 6 (on LinkedIn)

ABOUT THE COMPANY

The Bluesky Social project was originally started in 2019 within Twitter. The company didn’t officially launch until 2022. The team is constructed of open-source architects, engineers, and designers with the goal to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.
Bluesky’s current goal is to find another means to sustain its network outside of advertising with paid services, so it can remain free to end users.
AT Protocol, which is the communications protocol the application is built on, is a new foundation for public conversation and social networking which gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience.
The company launched its private beta in March 2023 and currently has over 370,000 users and over 1.9 million people on its waitlist compared to Twitter’s 450 million monthly active users as of 2022 & Threads 100m+ users.
On July 5, Bluesky announced an $8M seed round fundraise and a paid service that provides custom domains for end users who want to have a unique domain as their handle on the service.
The platform is available for download on iOS and Android. You can also sign up on the bsky.app website.

MEET THE TEAM

Jay Graber, CEO

Jay graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and started her career at FreePress as an organizer, cementing early in her career her interest in media and journalism.
From there she started working as a developer for SKUchain, a supply chain company using cryptography to ensure transparency, for 6 months before Joining Zcash. She spent over 2 years at Zcash as a Software Engineer focused on privacy and Zero Knowledge.
In 2019, she spent 2 years as the Founder of her own events-based social network called Happening.
In December 2021, she joined Bluesky as its CEO.

Jack Dorsey, Founder

Jack Dorsey originally founded Twitter in 2006 and Square in 2009. He was an undergraduate student at New York University and introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.
He also spent part of his early career building software for taxi and emergency vehicle dispatch services.
He served as CEO of Twitter for over 15 years until recently stepping down in 2021. The company was acquired by Elon Musk shortly after in 2022. By the time of the acquisition, the Bluesky project was already up and running and was ready for launch earlier this year.

START-UP SOCIETY ASSESSMENT

Cumulatively, Bluesky Social has over 1M downloads and is averaging a few hundred thousand new downloads every month.

With a CEO who has worked at another company focused on bleeding-edge privacy and decentralization tech, it is no doubt that Bluesky will remain on this goal of decentralizing social media.
The concept of having a portable followers list that you can take with you across networks, rather than having siloed communities within individual brands, is taking off now as it did in the late 2000s with OpenSocial.
As the cultural zeitgeist becomes more aware of our lack of control over the apps we use as individuals, the unending desire to produce and consume content freely will drive us to the application or system that optimizes for lack of censorship, safety, and discoverability (hopefully).
Now that better and better content can be generated in smaller and smaller time frames, the ability to own your network across the internet will become imperative. Following the people you care to keep in touch with and interacting with the content they produce regardless of the website or medium it’s posted on the internet is probably the most efficient way to socialize online.
The hope is that amongst all the competition regarding an open, portable, and usable social app the users can win in the end this time.