Amino, the community-based social app once home to millions of fandom groups, is effectively dead. After being sold to MediaLab in 2020, the platform suffered years of neglect, extended server outages, and a near-total communication blackout from its new owners. By early 2025, users were openly declaring the app over and migrating elsewhere.
The Sale to MediaLab
Amino’s original company, Narvii, agreed to sell the app to MediaLab in January 2020 for $17.5 million. The founders received $10 million upfront, with the rest to be paid through advertising credits and monthly consulting fees. That remaining payment never came, according to the founders, who allege MediaLab failed to honor the deal and attempted to void the contract entirely. The founders are no longer associated with the app.
MediaLab is a holding company that has acquired several well-known internet platforms, including Imgur and Genius. As Forbes reported in 2024, multiple companies in MediaLab’s portfolio have ended up in legal disputes with it, and Amino’s founders are among those claiming they were shortchanged.
How the App Fell Apart
Under MediaLab’s ownership, Amino stopped receiving meaningful updates. Users noticed a gradual decline in moderation, security patches, and basic platform maintenance. The app was reportedly removed from the Apple App Store at some point, cutting off new users on iOS entirely.
The most visible sign of collapse came when Amino’s servers went down for roughly seven days straight. During that outage, the company provided virtually no communication to its user base. No explanation for what happened, no timeline for a fix, no acknowledgment of the disruption. For a platform built entirely around active communities, a week of silence was devastating. Many users who left during that outage never came back.
By January 2025, comments on outage-tracking sites like Downdetector reflected the mood plainly. “It’s been a month guys, it’s not coming back, it’s ok to move on,” one user wrote. “Amino is gone and over, it ain’t coming back,” another added. Server connection issues accounted for 100% of reported problems on the platform.
Where Amino Users Went
The collapse scattered Amino’s communities across several platforms, with no single replacement emerging as the clear successor. Discord absorbed the largest share of migrating users, largely because it was already familiar and offered similar group-chat functionality. Many users simply reconnected with their Amino friends through Discord servers or direct messages.
A smaller but vocal group moved to Kyodo (sometimes called Project Z), an app that more closely mirrors Amino’s community structure. Kyodo is still in active development, and users who chose it did so hoping its second major version would deliver features closer to what Amino once offered. Some community moderators preemptively moved their groups there, rebuilding from scratch.
Other alternatives like Clover were tried and abandoned. Several users reported backing up important community content to Google Drive rather than trusting any single platform to survive long-term. The general sentiment among longtime Amino users is one of grief mixed with resignation: the platform shaped real friendships and creative communities, but the writing had been on the wall for years.
Why It Matters
At its peak, Amino was one of the few social platforms designed specifically for niche interest communities. Unlike Reddit or Twitter, it let users build self-contained spaces with custom profiles, chat rooms, and content feeds organized around a single topic, whether that was anime, K-pop, gaming, or creative writing. For many younger users, it was their first real online community.
The platform’s decline follows a pattern familiar to internet communities: a founder-led product gets acquired by a holding company focused on extracting value rather than investing in growth. Without active development, security updates, or even basic server maintenance, the user experience deteriorates until the remaining community loses faith. The extended outages and total lack of communication from MediaLab accelerated what was already a slow bleed of active users into a final collapse.
If you still have content on Amino that matters to you, the safest move is to save it externally now. Screenshots, Google Drive backups, or reposting to another platform are all options. There is no indication that MediaLab plans to restore the app to working order, and the servers could go offline permanently without warning.