I’ve been writing software since before Linux existed. I learned Unix on real hardware, wrote networking code when TCP/IP was still something you had to explain, and watched the internet go from a curiosity to the thing that runs everything. I’ve seen a lot of waves.
Social media was one of them. I watched it arrive, watched it grow, watched it turn. What started as a genuine way to stay connected gradually became something else — a system optimized for attention, not connection. Ads that know too much. Algorithms that decide what you see. Reels, Shorts, Spotlights, Lives — feature after feature piled on until nobody’s quite sure who’s going to see what or why. Feeds designed to keep you scrolling, not to show you what matters.
A lot of people I respect quietly walked away from it. My nephew is one of them. He’s not a Luddite — he’s sharp, he’s online, he just made a deliberate choice not to participate in platforms he doesn’t trust. He’s not alone. There’s a whole generation behind him making the same call and a whole generation ahead of him that missed social media entirely and never saw the point.
The problem is that opting out has a cost. When you’re the person organizing the family trip, the club event, the group that needs to stay connected — you’re stuck. “Just make a Facebook group” only works if everyone you’re trying to reach is on Facebook and willing to use it. Increasingly, they’re not.
So you fall back to the group text. Which works, until it doesn’t — until the thread is 400 messages long and nobody can find the photo from last Saturday and half the group has muted it anyway.
There’s a gap. A clean, private space for a real group of people — not a broadcast to the world, not a group text, but something that actually feels like social media without all the parts that made people leave. I kept waiting for someone to build it properly.
Eventually I stopped waiting.
CraftApps is what I built instead. Small, focused apps for private groups. You name your app. You decide who joins and who can post. Nobody outside your group ever sees anything. No ads, no algorithm, no App Store, no distractions, no strangers. Just your people, in your space.
It works in a browser on any phone — iPhone, Android, whatever your group is carrying. There’s no app to download and no app store to navigate. People can add it to their home screen in seconds and it behaves just like a native app. Notifications work too, but only for this app — not a firehose from everyone on some platform you barely use anymore.
The first app is called Cove. It’s for the organizers — the people at the center of a family, a friend group, a club, an event — who want to include everyone, including the ones who walked away from the big platforms. It works like social media because that’s what people understand. It just doesn’t have any of the reasons people quit.
I’ve been a software engineer my whole adult life. This is the most useful thing I’ve built. Not because it’s technically impressive — it isn’t, particularly — but because it solves a real problem for real people without any of the compromises that made the alternatives unacceptable.
If that sounds like something you’ve been waiting for, I’d love to have you on the list.
— Neil