Prom.dev: the AI social app where you make interactive rooms for your friends

the internet i was promised.

by heather jackson — founder, prom · june 2026

hi, i’m heather. i was born in 1994, which means the internet and i are basically the same age. we grew up together. i did most of my growing up in kentucky, where the internet swam its way to me in a noisy, slow symphony.

i loved it immediately. i was a weird kid with nerdy interests in a very small town. the internet was a vast portal to other worlds much larger than my own. places where people like me could feel less alone, and where we could form our own communities and worlds together.

the internet was for expressing yourself and connecting with others. i made a piczo page and sent it to my friends, religiously refreshing my browser so my page count would grow and my friends would think i was popular. i ran a neopets shop. i wrote html by hand so that my myspace profile would play “kiss me thru the phone.”

then the feeds came.

i don’t need to relitigate the last fifteen years of social media for you. you lived it. the short version is that the feed flattened everyone into an audience. your friends became content. you became content. we expected to watch rather than engage.

and the kids who grew up inside it are lonelier than any generation we’ve ever measured. that’s not a coincidence — that’s the feed working as designed. an entire adolescence spent watching your friends instead of being with them. the tell is how they talk about social media now: it’s a job. it’s a place to build a following. optimize a personal brand.

the internet got a billion stages and no living rooms.

what games taught me.

before prom, i built in games. if you spend enough time in games, you learn something the rest of the software industry so easily forgets: interactive content is categorically more powerful than passive content. not a little more. categorically.

a feed asks you to react. a game asks you to act. it gives you agency, presence, a world that responds to you. people don’t form parasocial relationships with games the way they do feeds. they form actual relationships with them. games have been the corner of the internet that never gave up on the original promise. everyone else built channels, while games built rooms.

i kept thinking: why is this confined to games? why does the rest of your social life online have to be a feed?

for thirty years, the answer was cost. interactive software was brutally expensive to make. you needed a studio, a team, a budget, a server. the feed won because consumption scales and creation doesn’t.

except now it does. ai collapsed the cost of making software to (roughly) the cost of describing it. a nineteen-year-old can make it on her phone, for her group chat, in the time it takes her roommate to find parking.

software is the new content. that’s the thesis.

so, prom.

prom is where you create living, interactive rooms with your friends. you can choose an existing template for a room or describe something new you want to create. then the room comes alive. you can edit and customize it, or immediately invite your friends, your teammates, or your community inside.

rooms could be things like photo walls just for you and your friends, daily trivia games about an extremely niche interest, or a canvas where your friends draw and leave notes. there are currently thousands of rooms on prom that i simply can’t explain because they were created for people who would understand. that’s the whole strategy. we built the platform, and they are bringing the culture.

so this is my attempt at building the internet i was promised. a web made of places instead of feeds. built by the people in them, for the people they want to connect with, weird on purpose.

the feed had a good run, but i know what i want the next version of the internet to be, and i’m going to create that version.

read the full manifesto →