TikTok Competitor UpScrolled Surges to 2.5 Million Users

Amid the chaos of TikTok U.S., an independent competitor says it has just passed 2.5 million users.

While still paltry compared to nearly two billion TikTok users worldwide and 200 million monthly active users in the U.S., UpScrolled launched just six months ago and only had 150,000 users at the beginning of January.

TechCrunch says UpScrolled is a “blend of Instagram and X”, with the company claiming it does not discriminate against differing opinions.

“We launched about six months ago, and we grew to about 150,000 up until early January. And as of the last few days, we reached over one million users globally,” the company’s founder Issam Hijazi said during the recent Web Summit Qatar. “Now, starting today, we surpassed two-and-a-half million users globally.”

The default feed on UpScrolled is chronological, and Hijazi also said that the company doesn’t plan to boost or suppress certain views via algorithms.

“They don’t care about selling your data to someone else if that means profit for them,” Hijazi said while talking about big tech. “And they don’t care about your mental health, as in they will design something just to keep you addicted to using that platform as long as it’s profitable for them.”

Nevertheless, the lack of moderation means that some users have complained that UpScrolled hosts adult content out of place on a serious platform. TechCrunch notes that the app will have to create moderation policies and take content-related decisions that may alienate some of its user base. Hijazi says the company is building a team of experts to shore up its community guidelines while taking feedback from the app’s userbase.

UpScrolled isn’t the only app benefiting from the current TikTok U.S. issue, which was blamed on a snowstorm triggering an outage. Skylight, an open source app built on the same technology as Bluesky, now reportedly has over 400,000 users. Similar to TikTok, there are over 150,000 videos now playing on the platform. Users can also stream videos from Bluesky because of its AT Protocol integration, TechCrunch notes.

TikTok says the outage that interfered with several of the app’s core features — including the ability to publish new posts, discover content, and see accurate real-time view and like counts on videos — has now been fixed. However, users have also been skeptical of the updated privacy policy, which states, “TikTok collects everything you upload, including drafts you never post.” It also says that it will collect keystroke patterns, pull contacts from the user’s phone if syncing is on, and collect sensitive information like “your racial or ethnic origin” as well as “sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.”