Monnett, Luxembourg-made social media platform for humans, faced a slight hiccup when it was released into the wild on Wednesday. Developers were working overtime to fix the bug which occurs when creating an account on the IOS version.
The bug nevertheless felt very coherent with Monnett’s grassroots, “let’s all pitch in attitude.” And, to be fair, they did warn in their press release that there might be some glitches at the beginning. The platform pitches itself as a new, human-centric social media network offering a viable alternative to classical social platforms that exploit user data.
“Our feeds should belong to us,” says Filip Gaman, Chief Product Officer at Monnett “Not to algorithms. Not to AI slop. And not to surveillance systems.”
Because of the IOS glitch, at the time of publishing, Silicon had not been able to test Monnett.
But according to the firm’s press release, it promises to give its customers a familiar social and messaging experience while maintaining control over how their feed works. It does this through customisable, chronologically-organised feeds and a distance feature that enables people to control to what extent they see content recommendations. The app also does not collect behavioural data for advertising and has a ban on what it calls “AI slop.”
The name, a derivative of the Frenglish, ‘Mon Network Social’, will “not use large language models (LLMs) or machine learning to categorise or recommend posts and will not have ‘AI companions’ to chat with.”
Founded by architect, political activist and advocate for European digital sovereignty Christos Floros in 2025, Monnett emerged from Floros’ disillusionment with the exploitation of personal data by social media platform operators.
In 2025, Monnett raised €655,000 in pre-seed funding from European angel investors, including senior executives at Microsoft. According to the founder, 36,000 people registered for early access to the app, with adoption being driven in Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, the UK, and the United States.
As part of its ethos, it strictly forbids the use of the word “user” in its marketing, preferring instead to refer to those enjoying the benefits of the app as people or human beings sharing a digital space, in order to preserve the human-centric aspect.
While the revenue models of platforms like Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat are based on targeted ads powered by user data, Monnett offers optional, tiered subscription services offering premium features and deeper analytical insights. It does this to ensure “the platform’s survival is not dependent on data harvesting.”
It is, however, planning an advertising platform for 2027, enabling companies and people to advertise without hyper-targeting or exploiting people’s privacy.
At a time when AI is omniscient, it will be interesting to see how the platform polices its ban on AI-generated posts or imagery. And it will be refreshing to see what this policy yields in terms of content: a kind of social media laid bare or something completely different.
