SocialIRL

Social platforms were meant to bring people together and instead optimised for time spent looking at them. SocialIRL shows what people near you are doing right now, coffee at ten, a run in forty-five minutes, and lets you join. No algorithm, no follower counts, and phone verification on every account.

The loneliness that social media is blamed for is not really about screens, it is about coordination. Wanting company at four in the afternoon is easy; finding someone free, nearby and up for the same thing is the part that fails, and a feed optimised for engagement has no reason to solve it. So people scroll instead of meeting.

SocialIRL removes the feed entirely. What it shows is a short list of things happening near you soon with spaces free, and the design decisions all point the same way: no follower counts to perform for, no ranking to game, phone verification on every account, and the exact location withheld until an hour before. The product is judged on whether anyone leaves the house, which is an unusually honest thing for a social app to measure.