Somewhere over the Great Plains, a virtual woodpecker is headed to Alaska to deliver a message to my anonymous pen pal. At the same time, a zebra finch named Tucker flies to Manhattan to send my worn-out Cool S doodle to a friend.

These messages take hours or even days to send, depending on how far the bird has to fly, since that’s the goal of Roost, the viral “slow-cial” app that’s making carrier pigeons cool again. Roost comes at a time when people crave the opportunity to slow down and disconnect from apps that constantly demand their attention and embrace technology that adds friction.

“Everything on a phone is instantaneous these days—everything you do, it’s like you’re always getting some notification or something,” Roost creator Logan Mendelsohn told TechCrunch. “[Roost] It’s a kind of momentary break. “It’s resonating with people in a way where they don’t feel pressured all the time to have to do something.”

When you sign up for Roost, you choose four birds to add to your colony, allowing you to message your friends in the app.

Each bird moves at the speed it travels in real life, so a hawk will deliver a message much faster than a hummingbird. (Yes, not all birds are carrier pigeons, but including other species makes collecting birds and watching your friends’ birds more interesting.) If you really want to slow things down, you can send snails or turtles.

Mendelsohn, senior product manager for trust and security at Ticketmaster, started creating Roost as a fun side project to use with his friends, but they loved the app so much that they encouraged him to publish it on the App Store.

Mendelsohn’s friends knew something. The app developed a very small niche following, but began to grow exponentially when a mother posted on Threads about how her daughter communicated with her friends in Elizabethan English on an app that sends messages at the speed of real birds.

Three days after that post, the app grew from 10,000 to 100,000 users. Now, about five weeks later, Roost is close to reaching 300,000 users.

“People are the ones who really make this platform, and what people kept talking about is how healthy it is and how whimsical it is, and how much this helps them put more intention into what they tell people,” Mendelsohn said. “There’s a lot less pressure when you know the message isn’t immediately going to someone who I think has really resonated with the user base.”

As a day-to-day trust and safety professional, Mendelsohn knows that any social platform, even his innocent bird app, has the potential to be abused. So by default, only a user’s city is shared with their friends. However, you can choose to manually enable a “close friends” feature to share your precise location with specific people.

“I personally think that for any new platform that connects people, trust and security should be the first thing they think about,” Mendelsohn said. “When you can start from scratch with that lens, you’ll be able to build it into the platform instead of doing it later.”

Privacy concerns were also present when Mendelsohn created the “Pen Pals” feature, which allows you to exchange messages with anonymous users in your age group. When joining the feature, you are explicitly warned not to provide your actual contact information or personal details. The app deliberately doesn’t allow photo sharing yet, as Mendelsohn wants to develop more sophisticated content moderation tools first.

Given Roost’s sheer size and scope, did we mention there are minigames? — It’s no surprise that Mendelsohn used Claude Code throughout its development. But the type of people who flock to Roost tend to be people fatigued by the state of the tech industry, which led them to seek out a “slow social media” app in the first place.