I want more whimsy online in 2026, and Roost is a good example. It's a messaging app where virtual birds carry your notes at real bird-flight speeds, sometimes taking days to arrive.
The thing I keep coming back to for 2026 is simple: I want more whimsy. More fun, more lighthearted interactions, more silliness. Goofy experiences that don't have to lead anywhere — no monetization, no user growth, no user acquisition, no tokens, no AI slop. Just silly fun.
There's an app going around right now called Roost that is, to me, a perfect example of what this could look like. It's a social messaging app, but the twist is that your messages are delivered by virtual birds that travel at roughly the speed a real bird would fly between those two locations. Send a message from the middle of Canada to someone in England? It takes a few days to arrive. I already have two messages out: one landing in about 13 hours, another in three days. And then if that person writes back, it's another three days before I hear anything.
Just having that sense of delayed gratification and silly whimsy baked into the app helps us reconnect with slowing down.
Yes, it's all made up. The message could technically arrive instantly if the app wanted it to. But that's not the point. The artificial delay is the feature. It forces you off the anxious loop of "what if someone responds, what if someone likes it, what if someone DMs me." You send the bird and you wait.
The delay is the feature, not a limitation.
In a perfect world, we'd all pull out postcards and start sending each other actual snail mail again. Roost is a good start. And it doesn't need to live forever. If it's popular for a few weeks or a couple of months, that's fine. It sounds like a solo developer whose app blew up over a weekend, so it'll be what it'll be — maybe it gets bought, maybe it gets turned into AI slop. There are already some fair criticisms that the bird avatars are AI-generated rather than accurate depictions of real birds.
"That's fair criticism. But again, let's just have some fun."
But here's where I land: let's not take ourselves so seriously. Be silly. Be goofy. Laugh. The internet has plenty of room for things that exist purely because they're delightful, with no further justification required.
