Social media in 2026 is a crowded field. Some platforms count their users in the billions. Others are scrappy, self-funded apps with a few hundred thousand downloads. This report brings together data on 26 platforms spanning microblogging, decentralized networks, messaging, live streaming, dating and discovery, and a few new experiments, with founder details, founding years, and the most recent available user figures.
Figures for MAU (monthly active users) vary between sources since most private platforms no longer disclose official numbers. Where estimates diverge significantly, a range is given.
1. The Giants (Hundreds of Millions to Billions of Users)
- Founded: 2004
- Founder(s): Mark Zuckerberg, with co-founders Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes
- Headquarters: Menlo Park, California, United States (Meta Platforms)
- Users: Roughly 3.07 to 3.22 billion monthly active users, still the world's largest social platform
- Background: Started as a Harvard-only social directory before expanding to other universities, then the public. Now the anchor product of Meta, alongside Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads. Remains strongest among Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers, while growth has slowed compared to newer platforms.
- Founded: 2011
- Founder: Allen Zhang (Zhang Xiaolong), under Tencent
- Headquarters: Guangzhou/Shenzhen, China
- Users: Over 1.3 billion monthly active users
- Background: China's dominant "super-app," combining messaging, payments, mini-programs, and social feeds into a single platform. Largely inaccessible outside China's ecosystem of influence but essential within it.
- Founded: 2005
- Founder(s): Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, and Aaron Swartz
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Users: Estimates range widely from roughly 460 million to over 765 million monthly active users, with 116 to 127 million daily active users
- Background: Built around topic-based communities called subreddits. Went public in 2024 and has seen strong post-IPO revenue growth, with Google increasingly surfacing Reddit content in search results.
- Founded: 2010
- Founder(s): Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, and Paul Sciarra
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Users: 631 million monthly active users as of Q1 2026, up 11% year over year
- Background: A visual discovery and "digital pinboard" platform known for high purchase intent among users. Skews heavily female and is especially valuable in fashion, beauty, and home categories.
X (formerly Twitter)
- Founded: 2006 (as Twitter)
- Founder(s): Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone (former Odeo employees)
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Users: Estimates vary widely from around 388 million to 611 million monthly active users, depending on source, since the company stopped publishing official figures after Elon Musk's 2022 acquisition
- Background: Launched as an SMS-based microblogging tool, went public in 2013, and was purchased by Elon Musk for $44 billion in October 2022, after which it was rebranded X and repositioned toward becoming an "everything app."
Quora
- Founded: 2009
- Founder(s): Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever (both former Facebook employees)
- Headquarters: Mountain View, California, United States
- Users: Over 400 to 430 million monthly active users
- Background: A credentialed question-and-answer platform where identity is tied to real names, employers, and education. About 75% of its traffic comes from organic search, the highest share of any major social platform. Also runs the AI chat platform Poe.
LINE
- Founded: 2011
- Founder/Origin: Created by NHN Japan (a Naver subsidiary) in response to communication breakdowns during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake
- Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan (operated by LY Corporation, a joint venture between SoftBank and Naver)
- Users: 194 million global monthly active users as of March 2025, with about 98 million of those in Japan alone
- Background: Japan's dominant messaging "super-app," also strong in Taiwan, Thailand, and Indonesia. Offers stickers, official brand accounts, news, and content services beyond basic chat.
2. Live Streaming Platforms
Twitch
- Founded: 2011 (spun off from Justin.tv)
- Founder(s): Justin Kan and Emmett Shear
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States (owned by Amazon since 2014)
- Users: Estimates range from 140 million to 240 million monthly active users depending on the source, with around 35 million daily active users
- Background: The dominant live-streaming platform globally, historically strongest in gaming content. Market share by hours watched has slipped from around 70% to roughly 54% amid growing competition from Kick and YouTube Gaming.
Kick
- Founded: 2022 (launched December 2022)
- Founder(s): Bijan Tehrani and Ed Craven (also founders of the online casino Stake.com), alongside streaming personality Tyler "Trainwreckstv" Niknam
- Headquarters: Sydney, Australia / operated by Kick Streaming Pty Ltd
- Users: Estimates vary from around 10 million to over 100 million registered users; roughly 11% of livestreaming market share by hours watched
- Background: Launched as a Twitch challenger with a creator-friendly 95/5 revenue split (compared to Twitch's standard 50/50). Signed high-profile streamers with large contracts, including xQc and Adin Ross, and crossed 100 million registered users in April 2026.
Bigo Live
- Founded: 2016
- Founder/Parent Company: BIGO Technology, part of JOYY Inc.
- Headquarters: Singapore
- Users: Says it connects 600 million users across 150+ countries, though JOYY reported actual average mobile monthly active users of 33.4 million for Q4 2024
- Background: A global live-streaming and social video platform built around gifting and creator monetization, popular across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other international markets outside the US-centric social ecosystem.
Likee
- Founded: 2017
- Founder/Parent Company: BIGO Technology (JOYY Inc.)
- Headquarters: Singapore
- Users: Historically cited around 150 million monthly active users at its 2020 peak; current figures are not well documented and the platform has shrunk in relevance since
- Background: A short-video and effects app in the TikTok mold, part of the same corporate family as Bigo Live.
3. Decentralized and Alternative Networks
Mastodon
- Founded: 2016
- Founder: Eugen Rochko
- Headquarters: Berlin, Germany (Mastodon gGmbH, a non-profit)
- Users: Roughly 10.5 million registered accounts across more than 10,000 independently run servers, but only 750,000 to 1 million monthly active users
- Background: A decentralized, open-source microblogging network built on the ActivityPub protocol, forming part of the wider "Fediverse" that also includes Pixelfed and PeerTube. Funded through donations and grants rather than venture capital.
Bluesky
- Founded: Initiated in 2019 as a research project inside Twitter under Jack Dorsey, spun off as an independent company in 2021
- Founder/Leadership: Jay Graber serves as CEO; the project originated under Dorsey's sponsorship
- Headquarters: United States
- Users: Around 35 to 42 million registered users, though monthly active engagement is significantly smaller and has cooled since its January 2025 peak
- Background: Runs on the AT Protocol, a separate open standard from ActivityPub, designed to allow account portability and customizable algorithmic feeds. Positioned as the more mainstream-feeling, Twitter-like alternative to Mastodon.
Truth Social
- Founded: 2022 (launched February 2022)
- Founder: Donald Trump, through Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG)
- Headquarters: Sarasota, Florida, United States
- Users: Estimates range from roughly 2 million to 6.3 million monthly active users, with figures fluctuating month to month
- Background: Built on a customized Mastodon codebase, launched after Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook following the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack. Caters primarily to a conservative, pro-Trump user base and has faced ongoing financial losses as a public company.
4. Messaging Apps
Discord
- Founded: 2015
- Founder(s): Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Users: Roughly 200 to 260 million monthly active users
- Background: Originally built for gamer communities, now used broadly for community chat of all kinds, with 54% of users participating in non-gaming spaces. Filed for IPO in January 2026.
Signal
- Founded: 2014 (as an app under Open Whisper Systems; the non-profit Signal Foundation was established in 2018)
- Founder(s): Moxie Marlinspike, with later backing and foundation support from Brian Acton (WhatsApp co-founder)
- Headquarters: United States (Signal Foundation)
- Users: Estimated 70 to 100 million monthly active users
- Background: Widely regarded as one of the most secure and privacy-focused messaging apps, funded by donations rather than advertising or data sales. Operates with a lean team of around 50 employees.
Waplog
- Founded: 2010
- Founder: Furkan Kuru (some records also list Mustafa Ayan among its founding team)
- Headquarters: Ankara, Turkey
- Users: No official figures published; moderate web traffic with a global ranking in the 30,000 range as of 2026
- Background: A chat and dating platform allowing users to browse profiles and connect based on shared interests, positioned as a smaller competitor to apps like Tinder in international markets.
MiChat
- Founded: 2018 (MiChat Pte Limited incorporated in Singapore)
- Founder: Not widely publicized; the company operates as MiChat Pte Limited
- Headquarters: Singapore
- Users: Over 200 million cumulative installs reported by app-tracking services, though current monthly active figures are not officially disclosed
- Background: A proximity-based messaging app popular in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, letting users chat with people nearby or through a "message in a bottle" style feature. Has faced repeated scrutiny in Indonesia over misuse for prostitution and underage exploitation.
Viper
- Founded/Founder: Not reliably documented in current public sources
- Users: No verifiable current data available
- Background: A lesser-known chat app with limited public reporting on ownership or user numbers as of 2026. Readers should treat any figures found elsewhere with caution until verified against a primary source.
5. Dating and Social Discovery
Badoo
- Founded: 2006
- Founder: Andrey Andreev
- Headquarters: London, United Kingdom (owned by Bumble Inc.)
- Users: 460 million registered users across 190 countries, but only around 30 million are monthly active
- Background: One of the earliest large-scale dating and social discovery apps, dominant in Latin America and Eastern and Southern Europe rather than the English-speaking world. Revenue has been declining, down 11% in 2025 from the prior year.
Clubhouse
- Founded: 2020
- Founder(s): Paul Davison and Rohan Seth
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
- Users: Shrunk drastically since its 2021 pandemic-era boom; now a minor niche app with a small fraction of its former audience
- Background: Pioneered the drop-in audio chat room format, which was widely copied by Twitter Spaces, Facebook Live Audio Rooms, and others, before those larger competitors ate into its userbase.
Fanbase
- Founded: 2020
- Founder: Isaac Hayes III
- Headquarters: United States
- Users: A small but growing creator-focused platform; specific current MAU figures are not widely published
- Background: Built as a creator monetization-first social app, allowing creators to charge for exclusive content directly, notable for being founded by a Black entrepreneur specifically targeting underserved creator communities.
2go
- Founded: 2007
- Founder(s): Alan Wolff and Ashley Peter, alongside a group of University of Witwatersrand computer science students
- Headquarters: Cape Town, South Africa
- Users: Once had over 12 million users in Nigeria alone at its 2012 peak, outpacing Facebook's Nigerian userbase at the time; has lost the overwhelming majority of its users since 2018
- Background: Africa's first major homegrown chat app, designed for low-end feature phones with limited data requirements, which made it hugely popular across Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana before it failed to adapt to the smartphone and Android era.
6. New and Experimental Platforms
Roost Social
- Founded: 2026 (launched publicly around April 2026)
- Founder: Logan Mendelsohn
- Headquarters: United States (self-funded, no outside investment)
- Users: Grew from 10,000 to 100,000 users within three days of going viral, reaching approximately 300,000 users by early July 2026
- Background: A "slow-cial media" app where messages are delivered by virtual birds traveling at real-world flight speeds across an animated map, deliberately rejecting algorithmic feeds and instant delivery. Built by a solo founder using AI-assisted development, funded entirely through in-app purchases.
Quick Reference: Ranking by Scale
| Tier | Platforms | Approximate Users |
|---|---|---|
| Billions | Facebook, WeChat | 1.3B to 3.2B+ |
| Hundreds of millions | Reddit, Pinterest, X, Twitch, Quora, LINE, Discord | 140M to 765M |
| Tens of millions | Bluesky, Signal, Bigo Live (active), Badoo (active), Kick | 10M to 100M |
| Single-digit millions | Mastodon (active), Truth Social, Likee (historic peak) | Under 10M |
| Under a million / niche | Roost Social, Fanbase, Waplog, MiChat, 2go, Viper, Clubhouse | Under 1M active |
Note: Registered or total download figures are frequently much higher than actual monthly active users across nearly every platform in this report. Where both figures were available, this report has tried to note the distinction.
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