Social Studies
Art by Mike Sullivan.A New VC-Beloved Startup Rips a Page From Meta’s Playbook
Right on the heels of Instagram’s Twitter clone, four former Meta employees are set to launch a nostalgic (and imitative) photo-sharing app.
It’s a return to a simpler version of a popular social network. An app without fancy bells and whistles. A new iteration of a famously walled garden, one less commercialized, uncluttered (so far) by advertising, and with more palatable ownership.
No, I’m not talking about Instagram’s Threads. This week, as Meta Platforms introduced the world to its new Twitter knockoff, I was testing out a beta version of Retro, an upstart Instagram competitor built by four former Meta employees. It operates with an ethos similar to that of Threads—positing that maybe new social apps don’t need to innovate. Perhaps they just need to recreate something we once loved. (It’s not called Retro by accident.)