Read the mission statements of most major social networks, and amid the lofty rhetoric you will often find the words “creativity” and “connecting people”. But given a marketplace in which Facebook boasts 2 billion users, Instagram is crowded with “influencer marketing” and Twitter has become a byword for hate speech, is there still space for hopeful young people to make meaningful, creative connections?

A few years ago, the actor Maisie Williams was one such hopeful. At 13, she was attending a West Country dance school with far-fetched dreams of being a professional actor. Now, at 21, she is an international TV star, a budding screenwriter and, as of next month, a tech entrepreneur. On 1 August she will launch Daisie, a new social networking app for young artists. “We wanted to give people the opportunity to be creative,” she says above the bustle of a London cafe, “without waiting around for someone, somewhere to validate their talent.”

Comparisons with her on-screen persona are tempting: the role in Game of Thrones for which she is famous, Arya Stark, is a woman of many parts, changing over successive seasons from a sheltered ingenue to a shape-shifting assassin. But where Arya is a lone wolf, Williams is devoted to teamwork, and Daisie is a network based on collaboration.

“You have a profile, you have a timeline,” Williams explains, “but the way your profile grows is by the chains that you make. To make a chain with someone, you have to work together.” This eliminates the unhelpful pressures of a “follow count” – the benchmark of progress on YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. “It’s a two-way connection,” she says.

Daisie was born out of just such a connection. While shooting a film in 2016, aged 19, Williams met Dom Santry, also 19, who was working as a camera trainee. “Typically, on a film set, there’s a rule that crew do not talk to the actors unless the actors have spoken to the crew first,” Williams says. “I don’t like it, but it’s the etiquette.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Williams, pictured here in 2011, auditioned for the part of Arya Stark in Game of Thrones aged 12 while still at school. Photograph: HBO/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Santry, displaying an irreverence for niceties that seems to be his leading characteristic, approached Williams between scenes and asked her straight out if she wanted to direct a short film.

“In terms of business partnerships, it was a match made in heaven,” Williams says. “I’ve always had these dreams, and Dom has the balls to go and do it.”

This disdain for boundaries seems hardwired into Daisie’s concept. If it works as its creators imagine, users – film-makers, photographers, graphic artists, designers, musicians – will be able to reach across social and geographical divides and make music, films and other artwork, sidestepping the outdated old boys’ network. “I’ve worked with maybe three or four female directors in my career,” Williams says, “which is amazing, if you think that some people never work with a female director. And more often than not, their story goes: ‘I was sick of waiting for somebody to give me an opportunity, so I did it myself.’ It’s happening. People are sick of waiting for someone to tell them they’re good enough.”

Arya Stark was Williams’s first acting role, earned through an exhaustive casting process of unknown talent, and she is aware of her good fortune and of the privilege it has given her. “When I was 12 or 13, I auditioned for every stage school in London and didn’t get in,” she says. “Had I not got Game of Thrones, I think that would probably have been the end of it for me. So I’ve always pictured that person who these opportunities were not around for.” Williams and Santry see Daisie as a chance for young people to bypass the obstacles, internal and external, that prevent budding artists from gaining recognition and exposure.

I auditioned for every stage school and didn’t get in. Had I not got Game of Thrones, that would have been the end of it

For all the accusations of frivolity and self-interest often levelled at actors and celebrities who reach beyond their accepted sphere, Williams displays a determination more associated with a businessperson than a child star. When during our interview in the cafe a customer makes to photograph her with his iPhone, her eyes flash and she lifts a warning finger: “Ask,” she says firmly, and the offending phone disappears.

While Williams may have the acumen to enter this competitive field, Santry has provided her with a missing ingredient. “I’ve always had a huge lack of confidence in myself in this industry,” she confesses. “I didn’t train, I wasn’t discovered in a traditional way, so I’ve always felt on the back foot.” Santry, on the other hand, has an air of certainty about him which makes Daisie – a risky scheme – seem possible. “There’s no monetary plan right now,” he says coolly, as if lacking a long-term plan was all part of the long-term plan.

The history of celebrities trying their hand at social media entrepreneurshipis a patchy one. Justin Timberlake bought a stake in the once-great Myspace in 2011, but failed to rescue it and sold it again in 2015. His wife, Jessica Biel, was no more successful with her charity network MTDN.com, and nor was MC Hammer, whose cheerful platform for dance videos shimmied off the map in 2011. Perhaps the most inglorious attempt was Menshn, a short-lived Twitter rival founded by then MP Louise Mensch in 2012, which collapsed in acrimony and scandal less than a year later.

On the other hand, Will Ferrell has found huge success with Funny Or Die, a comedy video network where bedroom-made gag reels rub shoulders with big-name sketch comedies. Edward Norton’s successful social fundraising platform, CrowdRise, was bought by GoFundMe last year. Most pertinent to the Daisie experiment is HitRecord, a collaborative artists’ platform founded by the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which bears certain basic resemblances to Daisie. HitRecord has gathered a significant and productive user-base and has resulted in the production of some successful film and music projects. Depending on your angle, this success should be either encouraging for Daisie, or troubling.

Besides these celebrity efforts, specialist artists’ networks already abound: Vimeo for film-makers, Soundcloud and Bandcamp for musicians, Flickr and 500px for photographers, Behance for graphic artists. Santry acknowledges this: “I was speaking to someone in Silicon Valley who said Daisie ‘is kind of a mashup of LinkedIn, Behance, Instagram and GitHub’.” He believes Daisie offers a unique benefit by celebrating unfinished work. “On traditional social media – YouTube, Instagram etc – you see this finalised, perfected, beautiful thing,” he says, “and it seems a lifetime away. Our idea is that we can create a place where you see that first spark of imagination, the raw concept.”

Dr Bernard Hogan, senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, is apprehensive about the potential for new social networks to succeed in a flooded market. “Now is an interesting time,” he tells me by email. “I don’t think much is going to gain traction in a way that competes with Facebook. Instead, we should ask what can these sites do or facilitate that help people create meaning, whether it’s among a crowd or only a few people.” Hogan says that Daisie would need a clear sense of purpose and, of course, the right kind of users: “A social network site is only as good as its audience, and getting a large and vibrant enough audience is a real challenge for any new entrant.”

With this in mind, Santry and Williams have gathered together 100 promising young people to kickstart the app’s membership. Known as the Daisie 100, the group includes illustrators, producers, photographers and other artists from across the world, chosen from thousands of applicants. I spoke to Alex Sawyer, a rapper and actor from London who made the list, and who feels that Daisie answers a new magpie sensibility among millennial artists. “Take Childish Gambino,” he says, “the most multitalented person in the world. Or Aziz Ansari, who has a standup, a book and a TV series, all on the same subject. I think that’s what a lot of young people want to do now: use all the formats possible to reach as many people as possible.” Sawyer is optimistic about Daisie’s ability to enable this diversification: “It’s about finding people who are like-minded and are willing to collaborate. I’d like that to be what this app promotes.” Sawyer has already incorporated Daisie into his creative process, and plans to prepare his latest EP to coincide with the app’s launch.

Despite Daisie’s name – from Dom and Maisie – Williams and Santry are adamant it is no vanity project. “We’re all about helping people start their own careers – we’re not about our careers,” Williams says. “That’s our ethos at the company.” Such sentiments seem especially important in the wake of revelations about data breaches, cyber-warfare and other skulduggery, which have corroded trust in social networks. Christian Fuchs, professor of social media at the University of Westminster, explains the moral obligations that face newcomers like Daisie: “A true alternative needs to be non-commercial, non-profit-oriented, privacy-friendly, minimise the collected data, and give users control over the basic settings.”

It’s a lot to ask of the two 21-year-olds, but for all the challenges they face, Williams and Santry are driven by the belief that key to a young artist’s success is self-confidence – a quality hard to develop in a world of closed doors and glass ceilings. “It’s for people who are struggling,” Santry says, “people who are genuinely interested in learning from one another, engaging with one another. To have a platform that’s directly for those people: that’s the dream.”

As for Daisie’s future, that depends on the success of a recent funding drive in California, and on how much momentum they can gather over the next year or so. Williams smiles: “People are constantly looking for the next hot thing,” she says. “And what we might be sitting on is an app full of the next hot thing.”