It’s time to welcome back two social networks we once loved: Friendster and Vine.
After shutting down in the 2010s, the two social media platforms are rising from the dead this week.
Both of the apps, however, are Frankenstein versions of their predecessors. Neither is being resurrected by its original founders, and the app design and experiences differ from the original platforms.
Nostalgia for a simpler internet, especially for those who remember the early days with rose-colored glasses, is partially fueling this resurgence.
Evan Henshaw-Plath — who goes by Rabble — is the early Twitter employee behind the Vine reboot, DiVine.
He said that “people look back” at the era of social media before everything got so darn big. People not only miss the features and feel of these old apps, but also that time period.
“It’s very telling that in the beginning of the year, people were looking back to 2016,” he said, referring to a social media trend of people romanticizing that year.
Vine officially shut down in 2017 after being acquired by Twitter in 2012, paving the way for the rise of TikTok and other short-form feeds.
Its remake, DiVine, revived hundreds of thousands of old Vine videos from digital archives. Users can post new Vine-style six-second videos. The content must be filmed directly within the app, and DiVine has a firm anti-AI-slop stance. The project is also decentralized and built on Nostr, an open-source protocol not owned by a single company.
DiVine is funded by And Other Stuff, a nonprofit that received a $10 million grant from Jack Dorsey.
Meanwhile, Friendster, a social network that predated Myspace and Facebook, was rebuilt by startup founder Mike Carson as a no-frills mobile social app for your real-life friends. For example, users can only add new friends by tapping their iPhones in person. (So far, I have a grand total of one friend: Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos, who told me she was an OG Friendster fan.)
Carson told Business Insider that he paid about $30,000 for the Friendster domain and trademark.
After being overtaken by the rise of Myspace and then later Facebook, Friendster rebranded as a gaming company in 2011. By 2015, it shut down its website.
The new app — which doesn’t resemble the former version much other than its shared name — quickly jumped to No. 12 in Apple’s App Store social networking category on Thursday.
What’s old is new again on the internet
I’m not old enough to be on the original Friendster, but I remember the Vine days well. I’m also not alone in feeling nostalgic for the earlier days of the internet (or particularly, the 2010s).
Carson wrote in a Medium post this week that while today’s social networks “foster a lot of negativity,” he remembers the original days of Friendster as “a positive and enjoyable experience.”
DiVine and Friendster aren’t the only internet relics that have been resurrected recently.
Last year, Digg, once a rival to Reddit, was revived by its original cofounder, Kevin Rose, and Alexis Ohanian (a cofounder of Reddit). In March, however, the company said it was downsizing its team and rethinking its strategy.
Building any new social platform is an uphill battle, even if you have a recognizable name from a previous era.
People are loyal to the platforms they’ve already dug their heels into, and getting them to migrate can be challenging, Digg’s CEO Justin Mezzell wrote in a letter shared to the platform’s website.
Friendster and DiVine could face similar challenges.
What’s abundantly clear is that there’s an appetite among founders to build alternative social platforms — especially those that strike a nostalgic chord. Newer startups, like Perfectly Imperfect or Cosmos, are leveraging nostalgia to build platforms that feel reminiscent of Tumblr.
The big question: Can they actually build a community?
Tech founders can build new spaces, or reimagine old ones, but getting users to stay, return, and create a culture is what gives an app life (or breathes life back into one).
“It is not the software, it is not the founder, it is not the team,” Henshaw-Plath said. “It is the community of users that makes these things work.”
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