20 August 2026
The shift from audiences to communities
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One platform doesn’t fix the internet. It just proves that change is possible. What comes next is bigger, and needs all of us.
In episode two of Un.Scrolled, Issam Hijazi breaks down what UpScrolled has taught him so far, the possibility of true digital independence, and where he sees the next chapter going.
1. Was building a social platform always the goal, or did it become the foundation for something bigger?
Building another social media platform was never the goal. UpScrolled was a response to the practices mainstream platforms have normalised, and to the assumption that people will accept them because they have nowhere else to go. I wanted to stand with people and give them a space where they never have to think twice before speaking their truth.
The longer I build this, the clearer it becomes that what we're building isn't a tech stack. For a lot of our users, it's an exit. A refusal to be treated as anything less than human.
That's now the foundation for every decision on the roadmap, and for plans that go well beyond social media.
2. Is true digital independence possible if the foundations of the internet are still owned by a relatively small number of companies?
It is. But we have to stop treating it as all-or-nothing. The trap is sitting back, complaining about the status quo, and refusing to build anything until full independence is on the table. That day isn't coming overnight, and that's fine. Liberation never happens overnight. It happens because enough people took the next step while the finish line was still out of sight.
Every alternative that gets built, every dependency that gets broken, moves the line. That's why it matters to me, not because I think we'll finish it, but because someone has to move it.
3. What would have to exist in five years for you to say digital independence could realistically and objectively be achieved?
Three things, and they're measurable.
First, real infrastructure choice outside Silicon Valley: cloud, payments, identity, app distribution, where switching is a normal business decision, not a rebuild.
Second, data sovereignty that's actually enforced, not just written into terms of service. Where your data lives in a jurisdiction you chose, and you can prove it.
Third, and this is the one people skip, a distribution layer that isn't two companies. Today, any platform, ours included, exists at the pleasure of two app stores. Until that changes, independence is conditional.
If in five years a founder can build without asking permission from anyone on that list, we did it.
4. A year into building UpScrolled, has anything you've learned this year started shifting where UpScrolled is headed?
The surprise wasn't a feature or a metric. It was how quickly we drew attention, from regulators, from people impersonating the brand, from a state that decided to block us outright. I expected indifference. Indifference is what most new platforms get. Getting blocked told me the thing we're doing registers as a threat, and that changed how I think about scale. Being big isn't the point. Being difficult to switch off is.
5. Imagine you could bring together the people building tomorrow's internet. What would you build together?
Infrastructure that lets people move. The single most damaging thing about the current internet isn't any one company's behaviour, it's that leaving is impossible, so behaviour never has to improve. I'd build the layer that makes switching trivial: portable identity, portable data, portable audience. Interoperability as the default rather than a compliance checkbox.
What that unlocks is prosperity that isn't concentrated in a handful of postcodes. Right now the value created by billions of people accrues to a few thousand. That's not a law of physics. It's an architecture choice, and architecture can be rebuilt.
6. What is the industry chasing that you think it should let go of?
The idea that data is free to take.
The entire AI race is being run on the assumption that anything reachable is fair game, mass scraping of work made by real writers, artists, developers and researchers, converted into products worth billions, with no credit and no compensation to the people who made it possible. It's extraction dressed up as innovation.
The industry should stop treating this as a solved ethical question just because it's currently a profitable one. It isn't solved. It's deferred. And the people picking up the bill are the ones with the least power to refuse.
7. If UpScrolled is the first chapter, what's the one thing the next chapter has to include that this one couldn't?
The layer underneath.
A platform can give people a better place to be. It can't change the terms they're on. We still run on someone else's cloud, ship through someone else's store, and take payment through someone else's rails. Every principle we hold is, in the end, only as durable as the permission we've been granted.
The next chapter has to touch the infrastructure itself. That's not something one app can do, and it's not something one company should do alone, which is why it needs more people than us. That's what makes this only the beginning.
8. If someone reading this wants to be part of the next chapter, where would you tell them to start?
Don't build for fame or money. Both are consequences, and they're bad compasses.
Build something that matters to people, and build it as though you'll have to defend every decision in public one day, because you will. The question worth asking isn't whether it will scale. It's whether you'd be proud to explain it to the people it affects.
And start. Not after the funding, not after the perfect stack. The internet doesn't get fixed by people waiting for permission.
Download UpScrolled:
About UpScrolled
UpScrolled puts people back in control of their social media experience. Founded by Issam Hijazi, a Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian technologist, it was built on a simple principle: social media should serve people, not exploit them. No shadowbanning. No data sales. Share freely, connect safely, trust your feed. Fairness and freedom in a digital landscape that has lost its way.
Media contact
Leila Dastyar | PR Director | leila@dna.online
