- The cofounder of Twitter is launching a new social media app at SXSW 2025. Mozi will encourage real-world get-togethers and forgo likes and comments. Ev Williams is leading the venture.
Evan “Ev” Williams has been a key part of the social media world for years. Now the cofounder of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium is looking to take the tech field in a different direction.
Williams will debut a new social network called Mozi at SXSW in Austin, the same city where Twitter began its rise to dominance in the space. Only instead of building your social capital on your number of friends and followers, this one is about getting people away from their screens and interacting in the real world once again.
The app, which soft-launched months ago, will alert people when they are in the same city as the contacts in their phone. It will also let you know if those friends and contacts are attending any events in the area. The idea is to focus on the “social” part of social media.
“While I treasure and nurture my friendships today, I was not always so mindful about them,” Williams wrote in a blog post introducing Mozi. “Just a couple of years ago, I was trying to make a list of people to invite to my 50th birthday, and I had a sad realization: I didn’t have a robust set of friendships I felt great about given my stage in life… After a lifetime working at mattering, I realized I had under-invested in what really mattered: Relationships.”
Mozi has already raised $6 million in venture capital funding, with backers including the cofounders of Foursquare Labs and Musical.ly (which was acquired by TikTok), and assembled a staff of roughly a dozen people. The hard part, of course, is attracting an audience.
Williams is determined not to use the social media catnip of likes and comments to do that. He has called those “unhealthy” in the past. That’s what makes SXSW such an appealing launch spot. It debuts in a town where there are tons of events going on—and where most people know someone at the event.
“In the quest to maximize engagement, the timeline of friends and people you picked to follow turned into a free-for-all battle for attention,” he wrote. “And it turns out, for most people, your friends aren’t as entertaining as (god forbid) influencers who spend their waking hours making ‘content’… In other words, social media became…media.”