Good morning! Lara Trump joins Fox News as a host, the NWSL will create a $5 million fund to compensate players in abuse case settlement, and another social app is growing thanks to the politicization of Meta, TikTok, and X.
- Online safety. Emma Bates started January ready for her app, Diem, to see a surge of activity. The social search platform’s user base of young women and LGBTQ people was the exact audience that expected to be affected by a few major events: an impending ban on TikTok and the second inauguration of Donald Trump as president.
But Bates couldn't imagine just how significant that surge would be. In addition to TikTok's brief ban and Trump's inauguration, January saw Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg alienate some users of Instagram and Facebook with a rollback of content moderation and an interview in which he called for more "masculine energy" in corporate America. And while X owner Elon Musk's involvement in the Trump administration was long known, the reality of that partnership in action (Musk's access to Treasury information including social security numbers, for example) turned off even more users from X's increasingly politicized platform. Even when TikTok came back from its less-than-24-hour ban, its messages thanking "President Trump" by name for saving the platform repelled some longtime users.
So Diem in January saw a 40% increase in its total user base and a 115% increase in monthly active users, Fortune is the first to report. Searches on the platform increased by 400% compared to December and contributions to the platform, including posts and comments, surged by 700%. Like Chinese TikTok alternative RedNote and Twitter replacement BlueSky, the app harbored dissatisfied refugees of fast-changing mainstream social platforms.
To support that growth, Fortune can additionally report, Diem has raised $1.8 million from investors including Precursor, Alumni Ventures, Gaingels, Swizzle Ventures, Otherwise Fund, and Rogue Women, bringing its total funding to $5 million since the startup's founding in 2020.
Diem's platform combines a social experience with a search engine, a combination of Reddit and Google with a different kind of feel to its community; the idea is that its largely female audience can interact with each other and ask the questions Google and even ChatGPT can't always answer. "We're building more inclusive alternate ways to search the internet for a huge demographic," says founder and CEO Bates, a 31-year-old Brit and early Away employee. Recent queries on the app include advice on how to leave a relationship, whether it's OK to ask a partner to get a vasectomy, where to get a nose job, and how to manage an all-male team at work. Over the past few months, Diem users have also asked about topics including birth control, abortion, and trans health care. Diem also prepared for 2025 by upping its data privacy and promising users that it will do everything possible to avoid complying with subpoenas if ever asked in abortion cases.
Diem last month launched its first advertising on the platform, through boosted posts and a "treat store" where brands can share products. So far its advertisers are aligned female-founded brands like sexual wellness brand Maude and protein powder Made Of. Bates is eager to see where big-business ad dollars are spent in the months ahead. She wants to build the still-young platform with eight employees into an alternative online destination, with its own web browser expected to launch this year.
"We want to make sure there's always a safe place on the internet," Bates says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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