The Future of Social is Private

Hey friends, I'd love to hear your thoughts—hit reply and say hi! I've been thinking about this for a while: As social networks become algorithm networks, followers lose all their value, and group messaging becomes the new social graph, what changes?

Why the Next Era of Connection Lives in Messaging

Followers are dying.
Algorithms run the world.
And we all just want our real relationships back.

The future of social is private.

For the last 15 years, we’ve been told that more is better.
More followers.
More reach.
More views.
More engagement.

Social media became a stage — and we all stepped onto it.
We performed.
We posted.
We polished.
We became our own publicists.
And somewhere along the way, we stopped talking to our friends.

We started living for the feed instead of living in the moment.
We turned friendships into content.
We shared our joy with strangers while ghosting the people closest to us.
Our lives got louder, but not deeper.
More connected — but more alone.
And now?
We feel it.
The fatigue. The pressure. The emptiness of it all.
We don’t want to go viral.
We want to go home.

The next big social app isn’t public.
It’s not built on follows.
It doesn’t run on likes.
It doesn’t pretend strangers are friends.
Because the truth is:
The future of social lives in messaging. The feed is just the new TV - a one-way street.

Every day, we open messaging apps more than anything else.
Why?
Because that’s where our real people live.
That’s where the laughter happens.
The check-ins.
The group trips.
The panic texts.
The memes.
The I’m-here-for-you moments.

The group chat is the new social graph.

So what if everything we love about social media —
Stories, live streams, reactions, posts —
Didn’t happen in public anymore?
What if those things lived inside our private groups?
Not for followers.
Just for friends.

Imagine opening your group chat — your 10 closest people.
Someone posts a story — just for you.
Someone else goes live to share a moment, raw and unfiltered.

No pressure. No performance. No audience.
Just the group.
Social, but small.
Private by default.
Intimate by design.
Because our real lives aren’t public.
They never were.

We’re not anti-technology.
We’re just done letting technology get between us.
We don’t need another algorithm to tell us what matters.

We already know:
It’s the people in our lives.
Not the ones watching from the sidelines.
It’s time to move from public performance to private presence.
From “how many followers?” to “who’s in your circle?”
From social media… to messaging that’s social.
Let’s build for that.
Let’s do more with friends — not with strangers.
A place to be intentional about our connection.

Let’s get back to the little things that matter.

If you're tired of social media, join the club. If you want to build and do your life's best work, join us.

If you're interested in building the protocol & network that will power the next generation of messaging apps at XMTP, please say hello. We are building one of the most secure and open messaging protocols in the world that allows developers to build the next generation of messaging apps that help bring us all back together. We've raised $50m from a16z, USV, and other amazing investors and are looking to hire incredible people.