For the past few weeks, every day at 7:38 PM ET, I get an email titled “seven39 is open again.” From 7:39PM, I have exactly three hours to check out an experimental new social media site before it completely shuts down.
It’s not an empty threat, either. If you visit seven39.com outside of that three-hour window, you’ll be greeted by a red “currently closed” sign. You’ll also get a brief explainer of its mission: “Social media is better when we’re all online together. No endless scrolling. No FOMO. Just 3 hours of fun every evening.”
To my tired old bones, that’s a compelling pitch. I’ve tried all the flavors of social media poison since the downfall of Twitter. In 2025, all social media has the same formula. The never-ending doomscroll keeps you on the platform. The longer you scroll and the more you engage with clickbait and the main character of the day, the more ads and affiliate links you can be fed. By bedtime, your attention span is shot, you’ve been mildly entertained, and sometimes, you feel angry for no real reason.
With seven39, the scroll is finite. There are no ads — just a single chronological feed from users against a purple backdrop. It looks like a basic Twitter clone. It has a 200-character limit. You post, and you can see replies along with likes. You can upload images, follow users, and see top-performing posts. There are currently no reposts or quote posts, and that three-hour window is tied to the Eastern time zone. Think of it as social media with a curfew.
What do people post about? The same things the terminally online have always posted. Self introductions. Memes. The obligatory pet photo. There’s a guy who, every day, posts a picture of a rat drawn on a sticky note. One night, I’m drawn into a steady stream of posts from a user with a frog avatar. All they do is wax biblically about roboids. Another night, I log on to see someone ask the community what’s going on. The answer: a user named death has accidentally eaten some deodorant.
Most people use anonymous handles, though you can use your real identity if you want. Some posts have long discussion threads, while others have just a handful of likes. So far, everyone I’ve seen has been cordial, though the occasional snark can sneak through.
It has the energy of a ’90s or early 2000s web forum: the kind of old-school site that you joined for god knows what reason, where you don’t actually know anybody in real life. After a few days, you start recognizing regular characters by their handles. When there’s not a lot of new content, you might wander away to do something else.
That retro feel is intentional, says Mark Lyons, creator of seven39. He says the ultimate goal is to explore if there’s another way to be social online, one that resembles how we used to be online before smartphones were a thing.
There’s a guy who, every day, posts a picture of a rat drawn on a sticky note
“There was specifically a time after school, where you go [online] and play a game, or your friends would come on and be on AIM at the same time. There was a consistent cycle to it and there was always something exciting. And then, everyone logs off,” Lyons says.
Most of the users I’ve seen and interacted with dig Lyons’ vision. “It’s a fun place where people are nice,” says user CameronBanga, in response to a post where I asked why everyone liked the site. “I like the old school internet feel to this site,” says another user named Ship. A handful of users also expressed how modern social media went downhill once “people started to care about looking cool online.” In a nutshell, seven39 users by and large seem to miss a time when things felt cozy and people genuinely connected.
The question is whether that’s enough to keep people around. The problem with social media is it’s like a local restaurant — you need regulars to survive. You need to give people a reason to come back, and if you want to grow, you need to find a way to bring new people in. On both of these fronts, seven39 has some work to do.
Many nights, I’ve forgotten to log in to seven39 at all. That three-hour window is ironically the time when I generally get dinner with friends or spend time with my spouse. Most often, I briefly check in on the site, see what’s happening for about five minutes, and then go off to do other things. Maybe I respond to a comment or like a post. But with a small-ish community of roughly 3,000 users, there are some nights where there’s simply not a ton happening. If it’s not sticky enough, eventually seven39 will peter out. Building new habits is hard, and I already often forget to check the site.
This is also very much one guy’s pet project. That’s part of the magic, and the problem. On the one hand, it’s cool to see features added as users suggest them. One day, there wasn’t the ability to follow or @ other users. The next, Lyons added it. At the same time, it can lack polish. I’ve had the site bug out on me when replying to comments or uploading an image. Lyons is also currently blocking off 7:39 to 10:39PM ET every night to keep an eye on the site. That’s not sustainable long term, especially if he widens or adds other time slots to draw in more people.
Content moderation is another big question mark. It’s manageable now, but even in early days, users question whether to post political or NSFW content. The benefit of a tight-knit platform is that most people agree it’s better to hold off for now. That won’t always work, especially if more people join.
For now, Lyons is choosing to embrace this as an experiment. He says it’s fine if this is a site that stays small. He insists it’s a good thing if users have something else they’d rather do.
“Maybe I will find out that this is just a cool idea and project, but not a viable business,” he says. “But I’m trying to build it more from the principle of, if we’re going to do social media as a society, maybe we should figure out a way to do it less.”
