Discover Amino: The Social Media App Transforming Fandoms

Amino is an app/service offering numerous communities dedicated to specific fandoms and interests, and many features for conversation and self-expression. This article explains what Amino is, how it works and how to use it, and how it compares to X (formerly Twitter).

What Is Amino?

Amino is a social media app that aims to bring the passion, energy, excitement, and activity of live fandom conventions to the world of social media. It is designed to make it easy to find and interact with other people who share your interests and hobbies, and to make those interactions fun.

Amino heavily emphasizes animations and video, and the ability for users to express themselves through design flourishes, such as frames around the profile picture that goes with posts and comments, special bubbles for your chatroom messages, and stickers that can be used in posts and chats.

The app was created after the founders attended an anime convention. In keeping with those origins, Amino has a lot of content related to anime, manga, K-pop, and related topics, along with other interests and fandoms.

How Does Amino Work?

Amino works very much like Reddit. It's a single platform that hosts a collection of communities, called Aminos, dedicated to a shared fandom or interest. In an Amino, users can start conversations by posting text, images, videos, quizzes, and other media content.

Amino offers multiple ways for users to interact with each other. In addition to being able to comment on each other's posts, Amino also offers chat rooms within each community (and a chat interface separate from communities). Users can both join communities to follow the latest content based on their interests and follow individual users to see their posts and comments.

Users will find features familiar to other social media platforms. In addition to the discussion forums and community features that are similar to Reddit, Amino offers Instagram-style Stories, a check-in streak similar to Snapchat's conversation streaks, the ability to follow users the same as X, and more.

In addition to joining existing Aminos, users can create their own Amino communities. Creating and managing communities is done using the separate Amino Community Manager (ACM) app available for iOS and Android.

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How Do I Join Amino? 

Joining Amino is easy: Just download the app from your preferred app store and create an account. Amino is available for iOS and Android. You can also sign up and use it via a web browser. To create an Amino account, use your email address, and then set up a password, username, and profile GIF.

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What Does Amino Cost?

Amino is free to use and is supported by ads.

Amino also offers some paid options and features. The major paid option is Amino+, which provides stickers, moods, profile frames, badges, and other visual flourishes that let your posts and chats stand out from the crowd. It also unlocks the ability to upload high-resolution images, maintain check-in streaks, and gives early access to new features. Amino+ costs US$25.99/year.

Users can also purchase coins used to buy stickers, profile frames, chat bubbles, and more.

How Does Amino Compare to X?

Comparing Amino to X isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison, but here's how the services compare.

Conclusion

Amino offers a fun, visually lush environment to chat about fandoms and interests. While it doesn't seem to have a single, signature feature like X, it has versions of some of the most popular features from many social media platforms. Amino is less a replacement for X than an interesting alternative to Reddit.