Roost’s “Slow-cial” app forces you to slow down the speed of the homing pigeon

Somewhere over the Great Plains, a virtual woodpecker is on his way to Alaska to deliver a message to my anonymous pen pal. Meanwhile, a zebra finch named Tucker flies into Manhattan to send my friend my doodle Cole S.

It takes hours or even days to send these messages, depending on how far the bird has to fly, which is the point Perchthe widespread “slow” application that makes carrier pigeons great again. Roost arrives at a time when people are eager for a chance Slow down And disconnect from applications that constantly require and accept their attention Technology that adds friction.

“Everything on a phone is instantaneous these days — everything you do, it’s like you’re always getting some notification or something,” Logan Mendelsohn, Roost’s creator, told TechCrunch. “(The perch) is kind of a break from the moment. It resonates with people in a way where they don’t feel pressured all the time to have to do something.”

When you sign up for Roost, you choose four birds to add to your rookery, allowing you to message your friends on the app.

Each bird moves as fast as it moves in real life, so a hawk will get the message across much faster than a hummingbird. (Yes, not every bird is a passenger pigeon, but including other species makes collecting birds and seeing your friends’ birds more interesting.) If you really want to slow things down, you can send snails or turtles instead.

Mendelsohn, a senior product manager in trust and safety at Ticketmaster, started creating Roost as a fun side project to use with his friends, but they liked the app so much that they encouraged him to publish it on the App Store.

Mendelssohn’s friends were onto something. The app developed a very small follower base, but it started to grow exponentially when… Mother posted on topics About how her daughter communicates with her friends in Elizabethan English via an app that sends messages at the speed of actual birds.

Within three days after this post, the app grew from 10,000 to 100,000 users. Now, about five weeks later, Roost is on the verge of reaching 300,000 users.

“It’s the people that really make this platform, and what people kept talking about is how useful it is, how quirky it is, and how much it really helps them put more intention into what they say to people,” Mendelsohn said. “There’s a lot less pressure when you know the message isn’t going to immediately reach someone who I think has resonated with the user base.”

As a day-to-day trust and safety professional, Mendelsohn knows that any social platform — even his own innocent bird app — has the potential to be abused. Therefore, by default, the user’s city is only shared with his or her friends. However, you can choose to manually enable the Close Friends feature to share your precise location with specific people.

“I personally believe that for any new platform that connects people, trust and safety should be the first thing they think about,” Mendelsohn said. “When you’re able to start from scratch with that lens, you can integrate it into the platform instead of doing it later.”

Privacy concerns were also at the forefront of Mendelsohn’s mind when he created the “Pen Pals” feature, which lets you exchange messages with anonymous users in your age group. When you join this feature, you are expressly warned not to give out your actual contact information or personal details. The app doesn’t support intentional photo sharing yet, as Mendelsohn wants to create more sophisticated content moderation tools first.

Given the sheer size and scope of Roost, did we mention there are mini-games? – It is not surprising that Mendelsohn used Claude Code throughout its development. But the people who flock to Roost tend to be people exhausted by the state of the tech industry, which led them to seek out a “slow social media” app in the first place.