TL;DR — the short answer

If you came here looking for "the new Amino", the closest match is Aminoka — same community-first structure, profiles with levels, walls, polls, leader hierarchy, public + private chats, plus a built-in roleplay matchmaker and OC library. Discord is the best chat-only alternative. Reddit if you mostly posted threads. Tumblr if you were RP-and-shipping. Everything else on this list has at least one fatal gap for a fan community.

How we ranked them

We scored each app against the eight things that made Amino sticky:

1. Topic-based communities — joinable groups around interests, not friend networks.
2. Member profiles with personalisation — bio, avatar, banner, theme, custom fields.
3. Leveling / reputation — visible signal for long-time contributors.
4. Leader / curator hierarchy — named roles with moderation + curation powers.
5. Walls + posts inside the community — not just chat.
6. Polls, quizzes, member showcases — interactive content beyond text.
7. Public chats AND private DMs — both live, both moderatable.
8. Roleplay support — original characters, in-character matchmaking, OC galleries.

Comparison at a glance

1. Aminoka — the closest one-for-one match

Best for: Anyone who came to Amino for the community structure, not just the chat. K-pop, anime + manga, roleplay groups, fandom servers, OC creators, leader-run interest hubs.

Aminoka was built explicitly as the replacement for Amino after the shutdown, so the entire mental model carries over. Communities are joinable around topics. Every member has a full profile with bio, avatar, banner, themed accent colour, and a visible level + reputation badge. Communities have leaders, curators, and hosts — the same hierarchy Amino used — with moderation tools baked in. Walls let members post inside a community without leaving for a separate chat tab. Polls + quizzes drop straight into the wall as their own post types.

What Aminoka adds beyond a pure clone: a roleplay-partner matchmaker where you post your OC + story pitch and partners send offers back (it spins up a private chat with both OCs pre-equipped on acceptance); an OC library with photo galleries and a public kudos counter for character discovery; a games tab with built-in mini-games (Battleship, Connect 4, Ochoo Plato) for warmup activities; live online status; a personalised feed that mixes your joined communities with onboarding-picked interests. The whole stack runs on Cloudflare Workers + D1 + Durable Objects, so chat latency is sub-100ms globally.

Caveats: Newer than the others. Per-community member counts are smaller — you're early. If your old community had 50k+ members and you wanted to land somewhere with that scale already present, this isn't it. But it's also the most active product on the list — daily ships, an open public roadmap, and no MediaLab-style absentee owner waiting to pull the plug.

2. Discord — best for chat-only communities

Best for: Communities where the daily heartbeat was the public chat. Speedrunning, esports teams, fandoms organising around drops, voice-chat-heavy groups.

Discord is the obvious migration target and the place ~70% of Amino refugees end up by default. It nails chat: voice channels, video calls, screen share, bot ecosystem, threading, replies, custom emoji, server boosting. Moderation is mature. The free tier covers everything most fan communities need.

What Discord doesn't have, and never will, is the Amino community layer. There are no real member profiles inside a server beyond a username + avatar. There's no built-in leveling — you bolt on a MEE6 or similar bot and end up with a half-baked simulacrum. There are no walls or posts as a first-class concept; "forum channels" approximate it but aren't where members go to share content. And there's no public discovery the way Amino had: you can't browse "communities about X" the way you joined a new Amino on day one. See our deeper Amino vs Discord breakdown for the side-by-side.

Use Discord if: Your community was 70%+ chat. Pair it with Aminoka if you also want the wall + profile + leveling layer.

3. Reddit — best for thread-style discussions

Best for: Long-form discussion, archives, search-friendly content. Lore-heavy communities, theorycrafters, fan-art critique groups.

Reddit's strength is that conversations live forever and are searchable. If your Amino was the kind where someone wrote a 2,000-word essay about a character's arc and people debated it for a week, a subreddit will treat that same energy well.

The misses: no live chat (Reddit Chat exists but nobody uses it). No member profiles to speak of. No leveling beyond karma, which is global and doesn't reflect contribution to your specific subreddit. Moderation is a nightmare at small scale because automod requires hand-tuning. And the discovery model rewards drama, not nurture.

4. Tumblr — survivor of Amino's RP and shipping side

Best for: Roleplayers, shipping communities, fan-art posters who want a customisable personal page.

Tumblr never died, despite repeated obituaries. The RP culture migrated there years before Amino's shutdown and the infrastructure (custom themes, asks, mutual-follow networks) was always more flexible than Amino's. If your Amino was 90% RP and shipping content, Tumblr is genuinely better than Amino was at the end.

The miss: no community structure. Tumblr is a sea of individual blogs. Tags + the radar give you a discovery surface but not "join this community". You can't run a 5,000-member structured K-pop community on Tumblr the way you could on Amino.

5. Telegram — best for chat-only at scale

Best for: Communities that need very large group chats (10k+ members) and aren't allergic to the platform's privacy reputation.

Telegram public groups handle thousands of members per chat without breaking, and the basic moderation tools (admin, ban, slow mode) are passable. Bots are powerful. The miss is the same as Discord but worse: no profile depth, no walls, no leveling, no discovery, and the in-app community-finding experience is essentially nonexistent — you need an outside link to find anything.

6. Guilded — Discord with a calendar

Best for: Communities that need scheduling baked in (LFG / event-driven gaming groups).

Owned by Roblox. Adds a calendar, recurring events, and lightweight forms on top of a Discord-style channel layout. Sees almost zero adoption outside gaming. Same community-structure limitations as Discord — no profiles, no levels, no walls.

7. Mighty Networks — best for paid creator memberships

Best for: Creators monetising a paid community. Coaches, online-course operators, paid masterminds.

Closer to Amino's structural model than Discord or Reddit, with named "Hosts", events, course modules. But starts at $39/month and is built for paid memberships, not free fan communities. Overkill for almost everyone reading this.

8. Slack — the work-coded option nobody uses for fandom

Best for: Almost never the right pick for fan communities. Workspace-mode, channel-mode, designed for paid teams.

Listed for completeness. Same chat-only model as Discord, worse UX outside the office context. The free tier hides message history after 90 days, which kills long-tail community content.

9. Facebook Groups — still works, but you don't want it

Best for: Older audiences. Communities where the membership skews 30+.

Mechanically Facebook Groups still has walls, polls, events, and decent moderation. The reason it's #9 and not #2 is that the median Amino refugee will not voluntarily install Facebook. Demographic mismatch is fatal.

10. Bluesky — Twitter-shaped, growing fast

Best for: Public-broadcast posters who want a Twitter alternative.

Bluesky has grown fast and has a strong fandom posting culture. It is, however, a microblogging platform — not a community app. You can follow people but you can't really "join a community" the way you could on Amino. Listed here because we keep seeing it recommended on r/AminoApps refugee threads and want to set the expectation that it's a different category.

How to actually move your community

Whichever app on this list you pick, the move itself is the part that fails most people. We wrote a step-by-step community migration guide covering the announcement template, the cross-posting cadence, the launch event, and the first-week onboarding flow that determines whether 10% or 60% of your members make the jump.

If you're still asking "did Amino actually shut down?" — yes. See our Amino shutdown explainer for the full timeline and why MediaLab pulled it.

Bottom line

If you want the closest match to what Amino actually was — communities + profiles + levels + leaders + roleplay — pick Aminoka. If your community was chat-first, Discord. If it was post-first, Reddit. If it was RP-first, Tumblr or Aminoka.

Most communities that successfully survived the Amino shutdown ran more than one. The discovery + identity layer lives on Aminoka, the daily chat heartbeat on Discord. That's the post-Amino stack most active leaders converge on.