i remember when social media felt alive.
not perfect, but alive. you'd open the app and see what your friends were actually doing. real photos, real moments, real people being weird and human and imperfect. that was the point.
somewhere along the way, that changed.
it happened slowly. so slowly you almost didn't notice. one more ad. one more recommended account you never asked for. one more video that autoplayed before you could stop it. one more "suggested for you" post from someone you've never heard of, selling something you don't need.
then came the ai slop. hundreds of accounts posting the same reddit story with a minecraft video underneath, generated thumbnails, generated captions, generated everything. content made by no one, for no one, optimized purely to steal thirty seconds of your attention.
then came the scams. then came the propaganda. then came the fact that three guys in california now know more about you than your closest friends, and they sold that information before you finished reading this sentence.
and somewhere along the way, the platforms stopped pretending to care about you. they care about the advertisers. they care about the engagement metrics. they care about keeping you scrolling long enough to show you one more ad.
i'm european. i grew up watching this happen and thinking, why do we accept this? why is there no alternative that was built for us, governed by our laws, accountable to us?
so i built one.
scrolr. is not going to fix everything. but it's going to be honest. your data stays here. we moderate actively. we fact-check. we don't let ai slop flood your feed. and we're built in europe, under european law, because that actually matters.
i want it to feel like 2016 again. not naively, i know the internet is different now. but that feeling of opening an app and seeing something real? that's worth building for.