The negative effects of social media, especially for kids, is not just a theory, it’s proven by hundreds of research reports. However, we live in a society where disconnecting isn’t possible either. Tribela aims to serve as a social platform that’s safe for kids, fosters community, and eliminates some of the worst aspects of social media.
Officially launching in Canada today, Tribela, which is incubated by Oxford University Innovation, is described as a “space between digital detox and doomscrolling.” Ironically, while Tribela is designed to help encourage a digital detox, it’s an online social network. But it’s very different from others. To participate, you need to sign up. It’s subscription based at a modest fee of $4/mo. for a family plan, so one fee for everyone in the household. But if services like expensive dating sites have taught us anything, some people are willing to pay for quality. And as alternative messaging apps like Signal have proven, convincing all your friends to move to a new service if you all share a common goal isn’t impossible.
Tribela is already available in more than 40 countries in a controlled beta. Natalie Boll, Founder and CEO of the company, says she started Tribela after recognizing the harm her child faced from social media. She banned her kids from it, but then realized that being connected online didn’t have to be harmful. What’s more, not being connected can be socially isolating. “Tribela brings the good parts of social media between overload and withdrawal,” she explains.
Boll gave her child the choice of either disconnecting entirely or using Tribela, which she developed at Oxford where she worked alongside academic and technical advisors. She drew on hundreds of interviews with families and users, analysis of court cases against social platforms, and global safety-by-design standards to identify how platform design can meaningfully reduce harm.
The result is Tribela, which offers a customizable feed you can control, protective moderation combining AI and human review, and content without performance metrics like visible likes or follower counts. The platform’s intentional design includes clear stopping points and no infinite scroll.
The app previously raised $800,000 in pre-seed funding to create its proprietary moderation system. The platform is currently accelerating product development, including the launch of Tribela’s Android app, the rollout of new community and creator features, and continued investment in privacy-first infrastructure and regulatory compliance. The company plans to hire up to 10 new team members in 2026 across engineering, product, platform operations, and compliance. Starting with Canada, Tribela will also expand to other international regions.
Tribela is available for download from the Apple App Store; there’s a waitlist option for Google Play once it’s available for Android.
Alongside the announcement of Canadian availability, Tribela has also announced that the company recently added Canadian online child safety advocate Margot Denommé to its advisory team. Rachel Bautista, a former Meta product marketer, and Dr. Jun Zhao, Official Fellow in AI at Oxford University’s Reuben College, continue to serve as advisors as well.
The company also launched Tribela Labs, an in-house AI moderation and integrity system designed to be licensed to other communities as a proactive layer to help reduce harmful content at scale. As a membership-supported platform, Tribela also launched the Tribela Creator fund, which supports original projects, paying creators across genres to produce work without relying on algorithms or performance pressure.
If you’re a parent of a tween or teen struggling about the decision to allow your kids to join social media, consider banding together with local parents to explore Tribela as an alternative to the big ones. Of course, convincing a teen that this will offer the same benefits as Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat is likely an impossible feat. But it’s a compromise versus an outright ban, and likely better than the alternative of not being able to connect at all. Meanwhile, the service is a positive solution for adults looking for a digital detox who can connect with a curated list of friends without worrying about likes, followers, and invasive content.