I spent several weeks glued to Raya, looking for as many familiar faces as possible. And while the experience created a distinct urge to go to the gym and start moisturizing, it didn’t exactly make me long for my single days.

But, oddly, it did make me nostalgic for an earlier, more Balkanized era of communication.

It ’s hard to remember now, but there was a time in which niche interest groups were exclusive and self-moderating. The nerds had their subreddits and Metafilter threads, the artists had their zines and Tumblrs, the 9/11 truthers had their email lists and subway pamphlets.

Then social media companies came along, broke up the clubs and forced all the gamers and sports fans and Instant Pot moms and neo-Nazis onto the same three apps, then acted surprised when nobody got along.

It’s not shocking, in other words, that Raya exists as an elite response to the homogenization of digital culture. The popular and beautiful have always had private parties, invite-only conferences and V.I.P. rooms. Why would the internet be any different?

What’s stranger is how little of the internet works like Raya, a digital space that is designed for its users’ specific wants and needs. It’s genuinely odd that in an age of plenty, when we have 300 varieties of mustard and lifestyle brands for every conceivable micro-demographic, we’re still satisfied feeding all of our digital communication into a handful of giant, boring platforms.

Whether or not Raya fulfills its utopian ambitions, it is at least dangling the possibility that not all digital products have to connect the entire world — that the internet may still allow for some secrets.