I Tried Seven39, a Social Network That Is Only Open Three Hours a Day
The Internet is always open. What if it was closed sometimes? That’s the central question at Seven39 , an experimental social network that’s open for just three hours a day, starting at 7:39 p.m. ET. I walked into the service last night to find a small, mostly friendly group of people eager to try something new.
We’ve been running an experiment for decades now where everyone on Earth uses the same pair of social networks for everything. It’s…not ideal. Perhaps this is why there are more and more alternatives to Instagram, X and Facebook, all of which have some kind of hook. Some, like Mastodon and Bluesky, make decentralization their main promise .
The catch with Seven39 is about time: you have three hours to use the site every day and that’s it. Considering the core mission of every other social network – essentially taking up as much of your time as possible – this is radical. “No endless scrolling. No FOMO. Just three hours of fun every evening,” the site promises.
I logged in last night and was captivated by the early 2000s design. There’s a box above the timeline that you can use to view posts of everything that’s been posted online. Right now you can easily follow this, but there is also a Top Posts section that you can use if you only want to see the posts with the most likes. You can also follow users directly, just like other social networks, and only see those posts in the Follow section. There is no way to promote or retweet – just likes and replies. Posts are mostly text, but you can also add images or 60-second videos.
All these features add up to the Internet equivalent of a small town. Conversations ranged in topic – there were several meta topics about the network itself (Europeans, it turns out, wish they didn’t have to log in in the middle of the night to use the service). However, for the most part people talk about their lives, TV shows and the like. I saw very little political content and nothing like influencer culture—just people chatting randomly.
And frankly, that’s what the Internet needs most: people chatting casually. This service does not replace Facebook or Twitter and does not attempt to do so. It’s better that way.