Developer Maurice Kleine shipped a web app on Thursday that could be either a boon for meme-making or the bane of your existence, depending on how you look at it. Mockly can generate believable images of fake conversations on apps like iMessage, Discord, Instagram, X, Tinder, WhatsApp, and more.
Tools like Mockly have existed since the dawn of instant messaging, but they generally aren’t the most user-friendly apps — many of the results when you Google “fake iMessage generator” are those websites where there are three download buttons, and you have to guess which one is real and which are ads that potentially contain malware.
Mockly manages to set itself apart while iterating on such a popular idea by simply being usable. Postfully, another user-friendly option, only supports iMessage, while Mockly supports 13 platforms at launch.
Some of Mockly’s templates are more believable than others. Its Slack template, for example, feels a little barren, while its Instagram template looks pretty legit. Another limitation at play is that Mockly is mostly reproducing what conversations on these platforms would look like on the web, and not on mobile.
Maybe it’s for the best if Mockly’s fake message generator is not 100% perfect. People still can and will be duped by fake message screenshots. But it is widely known that it’s possible to fake an image of a DM conversation, and people on social media are mostly primed to question the legitimacy of a DM screenshot. In the age of AI, where synthetic videos of world events are going viral and creating widespread disinformation … perhaps we have bigger fish to fry.