Kiyo is the new app you need to just be yourself without social media pressure

I have to admit something: it’s crazy how often I don’t share something online because of the intense pressure I feel to perform and curate a specific image of my life. Gotta make sure everything is on brand!

Posting an early morning trampoline workout selfie while holding Pressed Juicery to feel seen and validated by strangers and a few peers have become normal for everyone from my mama to my teenage brother. But it’s not normal, or at least it doesn’t feel normal to the soul.

What can I say? It’s Tom Haverford’s social-media obsessed world, and we’re just livin’ in it.

I’m not writing to tell you where I’m at emotionally with my social media usage. I want to give you a new world to explore — a world where you post whatever you want and don’t have to obsess over who “Liked” it or viewed it. In other words: a world where you can just be yourself.

This new world is called Kiyo. It’s an app that takes everything I love about social media (like sharing photos and random thoughts) but removes basically all of the pressure to stay on brand. When you share something, friends can respond directly to you, but there are no likes, no comments, and no view counts. Literally no pressure!

Pressure? Ew, no. Pass.

“Kiyo is like having 10 different finstas.”

A young woman on the app said this and I loved it because finstas are empowering! They give us a place to be real, which is exactly what Kiyo does. And instead of having to create multiple secret accounts, you just make different themed threads (they call them “kiyos”) and share them with different people. So like mini-finstas!

I keep a kiyo called “Outbursts of Gratitude” for photos of things and people I’m grateful for, and another called “Nope, Can’t Tweet That!” I also keep some private kiyos and share them with a handful of friends — not because they’re scandalous, but because I don’t want to share every part of my life with every person who follows me.

I’ve been advising the makers (full disclosure, they’re friends of mine), because I’m tired of the pressure to perform online, and I see this as a place where I can share what’s actually important to me. And duh, sometimes that’s my post-trampoline workout selfies, but a lot of times it’s the sillier, more personal stuff.

You can download Kiyo for your iPhone here. And if you wanna check out some of my kiyos, I’m @rivfifi.