When I joined Mozi as a member of technical staff, the first thing I did was try to articulate what made the product feel different from every other social app I’d seen or built.

It took me a while to put my finger on it. The answer is this: Mozi is trying to help you see people you already care about. Not discover new ones. Not grow an audience. Not broadcast your life. Just — keep in closer proximity to the people who matter to you.

That sounds simple. It turns out to be radical.

The Problem With Social Media

The original promise of social networking was that it would help us stay connected. That promise was real. In the early days of Facebook, you actually found out what was happening with people you’d lost touch with. You got invited to things. You made plans.

Somewhere along the way, the incentive structure shifted. Engagement became the metric — and engagement is best maximized by outrage, novelty, and the variable-reward dopamine loop of infinite scroll. The thing that got you to open the app stopped being “there’s something here from someone I care about” and became “I wonder what’s happening.”

The social graph didn’t go anywhere. Your friends are still in there. But they got buried under brands, celebrities, algorithmic recommendations, and ads. The feed became a product, and you became the audience.

Ev Williams, who co-founded Mozi, has thought about this longer than most people. He was there at the beginning of Twitter. He’s watched the arc of what social media became. His diagnosis, shared in a New York Times interview: “The internet did make us more connected. It just also made us more divided. It made us more everything.”

Mozi is his bet on a different approach: strip out the media, keep the social.

What Mozi Actually Does

The app is deceptively simple. It works with your existing phone contacts — the people you already know — and creates a private network from that list. No follower counts. No brands. No algorithmic feed. No ads.

The core mechanic: Mozi knows where you are (with your permission), and when you and a friend are in the same area at the same time, it can nudge you both. “Hey, you and [friend] are both in Brooklyn right now.” The rest is up to you.

That’s it. The app’s job is to surface a moment of proximity and get out of the way.

This turns out to be a hard problem to build well. The proximity logic has to be fuzzy enough to be useful (you don’t need to be on the same block — being in the same neighborhood might be enough) but specific enough that you’re not constantly getting pinged about people who are technically nearby but not actually available. The notification strategy matters enormously. The privacy model has to be something users actually trust.

What doesn’t belong in the product is almost as important as what does. There’s a constant temptation in consumer tech to add features — a feed, a way to post, a way to react, a way to see who’s viewed your profile. Every one of those features would make the product feel more like something users already understand. Every one of them would also pull attention toward the app and away from the person you’re trying to see.

The Research Makes This Urgent

There’s a body of research that has been building quietly for years that makes the case for in-person connection more urgently than any product pitch could.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development — one of the longest-running studies on human happiness — tracked hundreds of people for over 80 years. The finding was stark: the quality of your close relationships is the single strongest predictor of wellbeing and longevity. Not wealth, not fame, not achievement. Relationships. And specifically, close ones — not the number of acquaintances you have, but the depth of the few.

Robert Waldinger, the study’s current director, put it plainly: “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.”

Other research has found that loneliness is as dangerous to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. We are, by many measures, more socially isolated than any previous generation — despite being more “connected” than any previous generation.

The irony is sharp enough to cut with. We built tools for connection and got alienation.

In-person time with people you care about is not just nice to have. It’s literally protective. The warmth of an in-person conversation activates physiological responses — oxytocin, vagal tone, the kind of nervous-system regulation that screens simply cannot replicate. Video calls are better than nothing. Text is better than silence. But neither is a substitute for actually being in the room with someone.

Building for Real Life

The thing I find most interesting about working on Mozi is the constraint it puts on product thinking. Every feature proposal has to answer: does this help you see people in person, or does it substitute for that?

It’s a more limiting brief than it sounds. Almost everything you could build for a social app fails this test. A reaction system? That’s a substitute. A public profile? Substitute. A trending feed? Substitute.

What passes the test tends to be coordination infrastructure — tools that make it easier to go from “we should hang out” to actually hanging out. That’s a narrower product surface area, but it’s the right one.

I spent five years at Bunch building the opposite kind of social product — one that mediated social connection through a screen, through a game, at a distance. That product had real value. People genuinely felt closer to their friends after a gaming session. But it was always a proxy. Mozi is building for the thing itself.

There’s something clarifying about that. The product question isn’t “how do we maximize time in app?” It’s “how do we minimize time in app while maximizing time with people?” That’s a different company to build. And, I think, a more honest one.

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Mozi is available on iOS. Featured in the New York Times and built by a small team that genuinely believes the best social software is the kind that disappears into your real life.