Social media has never truly been “one size fits all.” What makes a platform feel intuitive, sticky, or even culturally resonant depends heavily on the generation that adopts it. Facebook and Instagram emerged when millennials were entering adulthood. They leaned toward broadcasting personal updates, curated images, and connecting with a wide circle. Over time, newer cohorts (Gen Z especially) pushed toward more ephemeral, visual, and video-centric experiences via Snapchat, TikTok, and BeReal
Now, emerging signs suggest Gen Alpha is already gravitating towards even newer paradigms, namely private, intimate, widget-based sharing as embodied by Locket.
This generational shift suggests that the next phase of social media may require building new platforms (or platform modalities) for each new generation, rather than expecting legacy networks to simply evolve forward. Let’s explain why below.
Legacy platforms age with their users and drift from the next generation
As a social network matures, its user base inevitably shifts older. Facebook is now often perceived as the platform of parents, older adults, and institutions. Meta itself is working to reorient Facebook toward community and video formats in an attempt to recapture younger users.
Gen Z didn’t “migrate” to TikTok out of mere novelty. They demanded a new form of social expression. Short, spontaneous, trend-driven video, rapid discovery, duets/duets/reposts, remix culture… all these features were native to their digital upbringing. The shift was less about “platform change” and more about norms, affordances, interface metaphors, and social grammar.
By the time Gen Alpha comes of age, TikTok and Instagram will feel like legacy infrastructures, just as Facebook now feels.
Each generation demands different values, intimacy levels, and friction
Every generation brings its own emotional sensitivities, privacy norms, and expectations around attention, authenticity, and content fatigue. Gen Z is known to tire of over-curation and “performative” posts, pushing toward apps like BeReal or Dispo that foreground doing less, being real, or resisting algorithmic feeds.
Gen Alpha, by contrast, is signalling a desire for something even more private, ambient, and low-friction. Take Locket, for example; the app places friends’ photos directly onto the user’s home screen via widgets. Recently, its new “Rollcall” feature turns the iPhone lock screen into a weekly collaborative photo prompt via Apple’s Live Activities, converting your lock screen into a soft social space.
In the first week of Rollcall, over 25% of active users posted and in fact, many of those users are Gen Alpha. In effect, the platform becomes something ambient rather than actively “visited”, a design intuition that fits Gen Alpha’s expectations of light, frictionless connection.
That kind of subtle intimacy and ambient presence is not easy to retrofit into a platform built for mass broadcasting or algorithmic virality. It works best when baked in from Day 1.
Fragmentation, discovery, and platform gatekeeping demands new entry points
We’ve already seen signs that social media usage is fragmenting. Young users curate narrower circles, niche communities, and side apps (e.g. act as a private group inside Discord, BeReal, private diaries, etc.). That Z-generation “layering” behaviour makes it harder for one central monolith to serve all.
Moreover, the discovery funnel itself changes. For Gen Z, TikTok became not just a social app but a search engine, entertainment feed, and discovery engine all in one. By contrast, a platform for Gen Alpha might put ambient engagement and automatic insertion (e.g. lock-screen widgets) at the forefront of discovery, rather than a feed or algorithmic ranking.
In such a landscape, starting anew or rethinking the scaffolding from scratch reduces friction and permits cultural affordances tailor-made for that generation’s habits, rather than layering on top of legacy constraints.
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