Ryan Haines / Android Authority
I’ve never been a big fan of TikTok. I know it’s silly given my always-online line of work, but I couldn’t make myself download one more social media platform to mindlessly scroll in my free time. For a long time, my stubbornness worked — I just waited patiently for top TikTok videos to hit Instagram and then laughed just like everyone else.
But when a group stepped in to take over TikTok in the US from ByteDance and implemented strict new terms of service, it grabbed my attention. It amped up tracking, pared back privacy, and caused users to flee in droves — many turning to a new platform I’d never heard of called UpScrolled.
So, in an effort to satisfy my curiosity, I followed suit. I downloaded UpScrolled and quickly felt more than a little out of place. Here’s why I’ll be waiting a while to try it again.
Have you downloaded UpScrolled? 22 votes Yes 68 % No 32 %
Same same, but different
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
I won’t lie — I wasn’t sure what to expect when I downloaded UpScrolled. All I knew was that it was a relatively new platform that prides itself on skipping censorship and staying away from controlling algorithms. And to me, that sounded like I would have no idea what I got when I opened the app for the first time. I was right … well, mostly.
Honestly, UpScrolled does a pretty good job of feeling familiar right from the start, once you create your handle and log in for the first time. It looks and feels a lot like a cross between Instagram and TikTok, with tabs across the bottom for search, notifications, and content creation, as well as a row of uploaded stories across the top. If I didn’t know any better, I would tell you I was scrolling Instagram in the middle of a fever dream.
And yet, it’s not quite Instagram, either. In fact, it feels the most like a tweaked version of X, or maybe Threads. All I know for absolute sure is that it’s full of images (a lot of them AI-generated), videos (mostly political, definitely not TikTok dances), and text posts (many from journalists being glad that UpScrolled is gaining traction). Somehow, the hodgepodge of content feels both exciting and kind of like the Mos Eisley spaceport — a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
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