Is this the future of social media?

There’s been huge debate about the massive role social media plays in our lives – some of it good, some of it awful. No matter what platform you choose – X.com, Youtube, Instagram, TikTok – there are censors at work. It’s certainly got a lot better with X under Elom Musk, but it’s nowhere near perfect as the temptation to fiddle with the algorithm can raise, lower or disappear your profile.

“Now, emerging signs suggest Gen Alpha is already gravitating towards even newer paradigms, namely private, intimate, widget-based sharing as embodied by Locket,” says this analysis by Emmanuel Abara Benson.

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.

Facebook is now seen as a platform used by parents and grandparents, while TikTok provided the kind of racier, shorter content demanded by younger people.

Millennials built empires on Facebook's status updates and Instagram's polished feeds because that mirrored our entry into adulthood: broadcasting milestones, curating identities, and friending broadly. It was performative, archival, and a bit exhausting in hindsight.

TikTok was a remix machine born for duets, stitches, and algorithm-fuelled fun.

Generation Alpha, born the generation born between the early 2010s and mid 2020s (in other words, in the tech age), are looking for something 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, says Benson.

“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.

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.

Gen Alpha (and whatever comes after) leaning into AI-mediated, hyper-personalised pockets, maybe even (God help us) with neural implants or Augmented Reality glasses where your "social world" is a persistent, shared dreamscape, curated by an AI agent that knows your vibe better than you do. Imagine Grok-created models not just chatting, but building worlds, predicting what intimacy looks like for the next cohort before they do. Like it or not, that’s probably where we are headed.