Social media is broken. And yet we stay.

How and why I built an alternative.

The problem

Nobody seems truly happy with social media. The algorithm feeds you content that makes you angry, your feed is full of people you barely know, and it feels more like a shopping street than a town square: glance at one ad for a few seconds and you’re immediately flooded with ads from ten competitors. Your data is merchandise. It feels gross.

The nostalgia for 2016 makes sense: just your friends’ updates, in order, no AI and all that other noise, back when the word ‘doomscrolling’ didn’t even exist yet.

But nobody uninstalls. Because you’d also lose the updates from your friends: the holidays, the hobbies, the parties, the personal stories. You’re trapped.

So I built an alternative

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on Acini: a private photo and video app for small circles of people you actually know. A chronological timeline. No follower counts. No ads. No data trading. Just a timeline, private, for the people you intended it for. And the data stays entirely in the EU.

The name comes from Italian. Acini are the individual drupelets of a raspberry or blackberry. Separate, but close together, forming one whole — that’s the idea.

The app is free to use, but I do have real costs — so I’ve gone with a freemium model: if you upload frequently or want to post video, you pay a modest monthly or yearly fee.

Since last week it’s in the App Store. My family uses it. My sons share photos and react to each other’s posts. A few friends from Bluesky joined in the past few days. It works the way I envisioned.

And now the real question

Acini works with invite codes. You invite your friends; by using the code you’re immediately connected. This keeps the atmosphere trusted. But it also immediately raises a classic problem. As a friend of mine always says: “Nobody dances on an empty dance floor.”

A network needs a minimum critical mass before it sustains itself: Metcalfe’s law. So my question is: can I build an app that people find useful enough to invite others? Because that’s the only growth that fits this concept: no advertisers, no paid acquisition. Just: you like the app, and you think of someone you’d want in your network and who would enjoy it too.

I don’t know if this is the answer to how we fix social media. And for most people it might not even be a problem. Mindlessly scrolling for a bit, that’s fine too. But I think there’s a group that does want an alternative, without all that noise. And for me personally: I’ve spent noticeably less time on Instagram these past weeks, if only because I was building this app :-)

This was also a great opportunity to experience what I wrote about in my previous post: coding is just one box. Building the app, with help from AI, went surprisingly smoothly. But the App Store process, the privacy policy, testing, security, working out the costs, thinking through how people invite each other: those are all separate boxes, and each takes its own time.

What you can do

If you’re curious: the app is free to download at acini.app, currently iOS only, Android is almost ready (if you’d like to help test: let me know). You’ll need an invite code; for my readers I’ve created acinisub04.

And if you use it: I’m genuinely curious what you think. What you like, and what you miss. Whether you invite someone. Or not — and especially: why not. That’s exactly the feedback I’m looking for.