I bought the domain friendster.com because I loved the old Friendster and wanted to bring it back. I built a social network on the site and have started to invite people from the waitlist. I'd like to make Friendster great again - do you have ideas on what I should do?

I'd like it to be about connecting with and making new real friends. I'd like it to be positive and do something positive for people. I don't want it to have the addictive behaviors and negativity that are prevalent in current social networks.

It is currently self-funded.

The problem with social media is that it encourages influencers broadcasting to followers over friends mutually interacting and winning over contributing (Great post here about ordinary / competitive conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43080290)

So fix these problems.

1. No followers. Mutual connections only. Put a strict limit of 1000 connections in place to enforce this. No one actually has a mutual connection with more than 1000 people. This only hurts people trying to gain an audience. Heck, make it so if you haven't read someone else's posts in a year, they stop seeing yours. Do whatever it takes to prevent one-to-many connections.

2. No public content. No one wants the whole world to read their conversations with their friends. The only reason you would want that is if you want to build an audience.

3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.

4. No newsfeed. Don't reward people for never shutting up. Maybe a chronological list of *friends* by most recent update and click into that to see all their updates.

5. No algorithm. Give people tools to find what they want to see; don't try to decide for them.

6. No re-post, no share, no forward, etc. Content lives in one place only, the account of the person who posted it, and it is only visible to who they said it should be visible to.

Best of luck on your journey! I made the transition from Friendster to MySpace when a bunch of my top 10 Friendster friends were dead.

Anyhoo, this will be a tough climb for you. Ello captured a lot of what you are going for, at least for users who were willing to part with Google+. Vine still rules for short-form video, Dodgeball still wins for mobile-first, there's Meerkat and Justin.TV for streaming, SixDegrees is still at it, and (let's be honest) most of us are still on AIM. I hear good things about Path too, they have an inspiring CEO and a unique product. Niches are the future; there's even a startup trying to help Harvard nerds get laid. I wish you the best!

I was one of the Ello devs (mobile, then web, then backend, then all of it).

My guess is that you'll have some diehard fans early on - Ello did, and they stayed to the end (thanks!) and they'll bemoan every single change - just roll with it, trust yourself but also listen to them.

If you get some success you will have a spammer problem (esp porn), but if you limit (better: don't have) public feeds maybe you can avoid the worst of this. Mutual follow makes sense as a way to limit the blast radius of bad actors, but then people will get spammed by friend requests. It SUCKS. Maybe you punish accounts that blast lots of requests but get very few follows back. We did something like this.

Actually one idea that I think would work well: once you have a "this is a spam account" determination, hide those spam accounts from real users, but let them engage with other spam accounts. This will cost you some compute time, but it will give them the feeling that they are being successful without distracting users.

Good luck!

Curation instead of moderation.

The worst thing about running a content hosting platform is moderation. You will fail at it, and that failure will hurt people. Even worse, you replace success with victory.

The first move is to let your users help, by giving them the power to moderate their own spaces. Of course, as every web forum (and subreddit) has proven, this isn't a perfect solution. Even the best moderation can never be enough. Moderated spaces become echo chambers that war with one another. That's because power will always be abused for rent seeking. In the case of moderation, that means moderators abusing their authority to monopolize engagement; and narrative converging into dualist team-speak.

So what if we eliminate the hierarchy? Instead of letting a moderator decide what content shouldn't be seen, let users collaboratively decide what content they want to see.

Every published interaction is an attestation. It can be the presence of content itself, or it can be something about content. That might be a category, a logical assertion, an opinion, whatever. By providing a subjective attestation about some content, we can empower users to use boundaries to find content that is interesting, and avoid content that is undesirable. Users could choose the curated lists they trust, and collaborate on consensus.

Objective truth does not exist. Everything written is subjected to a specific perspective. By using boundaries instead of rules, we can accommodate this reality as a first class feature of the system. Friends aren't journalists anyway, so the goal of interaction was never objectivity to begin with.

By reframing interaction this way, we can have conversations instead of debates; and even if you do want to debate, you can leverage attestations to actually argue constructively.

It should encourage meaningful real-world engagements, activities, events, charity, business development. Everything about the app should facilitate real relationships.

Use AI to help arrange meetups, or propose group opportunities. Imagine having something like facebook groups where AI is there to help you actually hang out and do things. Schedule meetups, rekindle lost connections, find activities, develop relationships, develop new business ideas, activate civic engagements.

This won't work either socially or for funding. Local circles are where it's at in 2025. Exclusivity, but not even stated by implication, and for safety and confidence. Homey exclusivity, like a close friend's living room. Knowing people already is cool. Hanging out with people you already know is social proof. Lean into that. It's already there in the name. People remember that brand from days when making friends felt easy.

My off the cuff opinion, find a way to verify the people on the site are not bots and actually real. This is a hard problem with some expensive solutions, privacy implications, significant trade offs and real cost, however it may be worth trying to address. Imagine twitter (X) or facebook without the noise.

Throwing out one idea: for the 30+ crowd with kids and families, how can you make it frictionless to maintain and build friendships, especially across different groups (building, schools, after schools, family)? Not necessarily as families, but just flagging events and making organizing events easier - my friends and I dont see each other nearly enough since we had kids. Everyone seems to be using WhatsApp for it and it's not great.

Make it impossible to sign up or add people through the site, you must physically touch phones to become friends or even get invited

Can't. You need to build a product that generates some revenue in order to pay for servers/developers. To do that, you need either subscribers or ads. People are only going to pay for it if it's really good AND there's a clear advantage over free users. People are only going to be online long enough to view ads if it's addictive. No other way around it.

1. Charge a small fee. Don't make the user the product.

2. No ads. See #1

3. Ensure the user is a real person by mailing them a one-time code on a postcard in the US mail, like Nextdoor used to do.

4. NO ALGORITHMIC FEED, unless you explicitly offer that on a separate tab.

I think it would be cool if you kept some of the original Friendster design and color pallette, at least to start. I would love a "classic" social media site with a modern backend and mobile friendly frontend. For example, Facebook's early UI had a simple, consistent, and blocky style. Menus were sensible I could find what I wanted to do easily.

Good luck with this project!

I have one thought to share with you, may or may not be relevant to your plans:

Doom scrolling is mostly an unpleasant activity. A lot of people, especially young people, do not like social media. Perhaps it's this passive consumption that is the problem. So maybe make Friendster more about creating than consuming.

I’ve made my own attempt in building a social network [0] and it’s evening running for me and my friends.

Here are few things I’ve encountered during the development:

- Based on my experience private only approach does not work. It’s all about network effects and if users can’t send their post to all friends, they’ll just move on to a different platform

- chronological friends only feed is really boring. Not that it’s bad per de, but it’s hard to convince people to stay if the service is not entertaining

It can also be me not being able to market the project right. Good luck with your attempt!

[0] https://github.com/can3p/pcom

Making male friends off apps can be complicated like Im actually only looking for regular friendship nothing else with dudes who like similar activities (hike, bike, outdoors, play guitar, sports, happy hour).

I've used Bumble For Friends since 2020 and have met 10 to 15 dudes for regular platonic friendship but 12.5 wanted more (sex, dating). So only 2.5 were looking for regular platonic male friendship ... the half one was with a guy who was bi and he never crossed the line until he did (year & half later) and that was that.

Luckily last year I found a new good normal (normal like growing up when you just made regular non-sexual friendships) dude friend and travel buddy and he has connected me to other dudes who just want normal regular dude friendships. All good if you aren't straight but unfortunately our male minds the majority think apps are to connect people for more then friendship. Which is a bummer!

With that in mind others have said use friendster for a way for people to come together in real life. Don't do AI stuff unless your using it to verify people. People indeed want real/genuine and the best way to do that is create local groups for people to meet to create friendships organically. Its a normal way to make friends for all sexes as we do and have done via work and while in/thru school. What im and everyone else is describing sounds like meetup.com but one that is free and for a younger generation.

This is a somewhat lame suggestion but in the spirit of Pinboard/del.icio.us or Bluesky/Twitter, a well-supported copy of OG Friendster or Facebook could just work to some degree.

I don't use social media outside of old.reddit if that counts but would strongly consider something like this. It would be easy to describe to friends; my friends/family over 30 are nostalgic and those under 30, especially those living on their own now, are curious about alternatives to the current state of things.

For the 25-35 crowd I think there's a draw of "interesting activities for date night" that are low-commitment and could build a sense of community but don't require pre-planning. Really hard to build a business around, I know. But in NYC there are all these recent trends of run clubs, reading groups (events where people bring a book to a cozy location and collectively read with some mood lighting), and similar community-esque events that don't require anyone to interact but offer a forum for those that want it to happen. I was talking last night with a friend about dinner party services, which arrange for themed dinners, and we were saying how we would be interested in that but we wouldn't want to just meet random strangers, there would have to be some sort of draw to a theme or an interest group; otherwise we would just host with our own friends in our own networks. Meetup.com -- that came up in our conversation and neither of us had used it in years.

It was outcompeted two decades ago. Friendster, Google+, Orkut… they were all outcompeted by the Facebook juggernaut, and even that has become stale in absence of real competition as younger generations have migrated to Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and others.

Friendster was early to the game but it died, and it died for a reason. Let it rest.

I think “addictive” is necessary in the sense that if it is not behaviorally reinforcing it will not grow, not be sustainable. If I was starting a social network I’d look at Chinese mobile games like Azur Lane in how they set up a network of ‘events’ and accomplishments that always give you a reason to play.

“Negative” is something else that can be addressed directly. To make a fact-checking machine you have to make a god, but to detect outrage and negativity you just need ModernBERT, BiLSTM and maybe 20,000 training examples. It is true that outrage engages people but take that away and you will find there are wholesome things like cat photos that go viral. How you suppress negativity is up to you, and people will always say that their negativity is their free speech, but detecting negativity in 2005 is mostly a matter of making the training set.

Event organization and birthday reminders are basically all that’s needed. I hear so many people bemoan the loss of Facebook of old for those two features.

Beyond that, I’m not even sure if being able to post things is worth it. Status updates such as relationship status and job might be worth it. But text content? Hmm. I fear it devolves into politics and other low quality discussion quickly. The modern Facebook brings out the worst in some of the best people I know. Sometimes we shouldn’t share our opinions so freely until we’ve thought about them more and refined them.

I guess that’s what made Google+ interesting. Knowing that you were posting to a specific circle, you could post more relevant content.

What's great with friendster back then is we can express who we are through themes or html snippets. We can insert musics, videos, or even flash games. I think that points are missing on today's social media.

What's great with friendster back then is we can express who we are through themes or html snippets. We can insert musics, videos, or even flash games. I think that points are missing on today's social media.

Ban any corporations or companies from making a page on it, only real people. Vet everyone and no AI bots. Kick out and ban people who are not good with the community. Just like any community, have people vouch for each other. No promoting, no ads.

Did you also buy the Copyright from MOL Global?

It would seem on first glance that you can't set up a social network called Friendster just because you bought Friendster.com domain.

I'd really love to see the combination of all the good things of social media coming together.

Groups with voting like Reddit. Sub groups like Discord. Friend feeds like old Facebook. IM like Discord. A disappearing posts feature like Instagram/Snapchat. Events and things to do in certain areas like S'More. A revamped phpBB forum style in groups. Etc.

And good monetization practices, e.g. selling ad space on groups or on keyword searches.

Social Media is a tough nut to crack but meetup.com is a crock of crap. Something to replace that and make new friends would be interesting.

I have an idea to throw in the pile. I am part of a small group of people from various parts of the country that meet up on zoom, using a link that the founder of the group got from their university that they don't even go to anymore. We primarily play Jackbox games with the occasional Among Us round.

Maybe you could help facilitate activities like this on the new Friendster?

I would suggest putting an emphasis on people being able to form social circles and clubs.

Also, if you ever end up hiring engineers, I might be interested!

An idea I had is organizing week-ends in big houses with maybe 30 strangers of similar age. You make them have a great time, and afterwards you invite them to indicate the people they really liked. Over time you can make them see each other again and maybe do some recommendation engine to guess who in the community they will like but still haven't met.

I don't know, but good luck. When I think of social networks that have stuck...

FB - incredibly local first market.

Instagram, YouTube & TikTok - key tech insight that photos / video were the dominant medium of their time, combined with great timing and user experience.

iMessage - built in distribution, and the good fortune that no product manager thought it was a social network for at least a few years.

BlueSky - basically just great timing and willingness to fully copy Twitter.

I think it's too early on VR social, and the giants are too focused on it. I do think that hyper-private photo sharing is interesting. I want to send photos of my kids to my parents daily, grandparents monthly, and in laws every couple weeks. The current set up for messaging is a little clunky.

Use it to promote making friends in person. Perhaps a curated and editable list of actual 3rd spaces in the real world. All anonymous users (like HN), popular 3rd spaces can be voted up/down per city/town. Maybe each venue could include posts for meet times or events.

I had some ideas around QR codes on business cards. The concept was you have to actually meet someone in real-life and then the friend you just met scans the QR code and your in the same network; QR code could be purely digital of course, but physical cards are nice.

Gary V had a good idea on a podcast with two guys and coffee recently. Have two tabs, one feed limited to 150 friends max and the other to an interest based feed. Thought it was a good idea

That\s going to be fun. Let me know if you need any help with highload system design or other tech-related things..

Make it decentralized. You could implements atproto protocol by bluesky you could get some traction with publicity. Oh and by the way stay clear off anything hinting your political leaning (Make 'something' great again?).

You should start by thinking federated to make it great again ! I love what bluesky is doing. You can either go that route or build full compatible Activity Pub + your own layer of whatever feature you want to add on top of it.

For me personally, anything using the phrasing make ______ great again is a huge turn off. Maybe dispense with language that a lot of people might find to be divisive if your goal is to make it a positive environment.

Anti-spam and offensive content might be a challenge for small initiatives.

I'd start by asking an ugly, but critical question: how do you intend to keep it funded?

If you don't want to allow easy enshittification, what does that site/product look like, for which users, and what is the value prop that makes that appealingAND at what scale?

I think most YC folks only think in "webscale" and not in any niche or boutique upmarket way and that acts as a forcing function for how much and how fast something scales, which in turn influences so much of the rest of what you do around that.

I don't want to suggest what Friendster ought to be, but I do think you need to decide how you want to ascertain that, and then look into the "how"

Nit: the copyright year on your website is wrong (says 2024)

Please just make an option for people's feeds to be purely chronological. That alone would make it a step above most social media out there now.

It depends on, how will it be different from Facebook/X/Insta or other such popular networking sites? The name is cool though.

Joking, but if all else fails....

Make it a Mastodon server!

I used to quite like Friendster too, but I can't imagine what you could do with it now because human beings are simply awful. I moved to a new city back in pandemic times and installed Nextdoor on my phone with the idea that it might help me meet some of the new neighbours, but I very quickly decided I didn't want to meet any of the people on Nextdoor.

- Check how and what Path.com was - to begin with you can just copy it

- Then check why it failed - can you avoid that? Or will money will not be a concern?

- To offset cost, see if you can do things like letting users share links of media, rather than you hosting it. Etc.

- Do not offer it for free (not beyond beta/alpha). That’s a sure shot way to become what you are trying not to become. And think about the geography/country before setting the price — purchasing powers are different that way. Or if not then target an income/social bracket, who will pay for it, and stick to it.

- Also, accept that — it will be a niche product - from the beginning. The masses don’t want they don’t already have and even if they’d want something else - it will be some Frankenstein or the other.

tl;dr: Making something “nice” will not be your problem. It will be how to stay financially afloat as it WILL NOT be a mass thing.

You can't make it great again, because in large part these type of projects were built on a lie, and now everyone knows the lie.

The lie itself doesn't start out being a lie, but it rapidly becomes the lie in the aggregate of the choices you must make behind the scenes along the way emergent-ly from the centralized nature of any platform which is needed for moderation, and the requirements to operate as a business.

Any system with two or more mandates always fails the lesser of the mandates.

There can be no trust, Facebook and its analogues have used it all up.

You don't develop strong relationships by spending your time in front of a computer. Real friends don't seek friends on social media.

As with any communication channel today, you also must capably defend your platform from all manner of nation-state threats that now use 5th Generation Warfare on individuals through social media. Propaganda, Isolation, Torture, Radicalization. If you don't know a thing about these very dark things, there's no shot in the dark where you can actually come up with something that works as a stopgap.

The juice simply isn't worth the squeeze because its a blackhole, and once Scylla has you she pulls you in.

Revenue is from subscriptions or advertising?

Hard to answer.

First: What are your real goals?

I think you should look at governance; your incentives; and the incentives that you provide to your users. The incentives should ultimately bring you (and your users) to your goals.

Personally, I'm disappointed with the "for profit" model of social networks. I think they should behave differently, either like democracies, community centers, or like a church. Specifically, decisions about "what the product is" need a lot more control from the users themselves.

I'd like to see a social network where everyone is to some extent verified. If you aren't willing to put your identity behind what you're saying then maybe keep it to yourself.

Nested comments in the style of reddit/HN are great for facilitating conversations. Part of why I left Facebook was they seem to be actively trying to hinder discussion.

Favor facts and reality over sensationalism and conspiracy BS.

No bigotry.

Reserve it for your own friends, and just have fun? Seems the most genuine approach.

personally i would never use a service advertised with "make ___ great again" but thank you for making the organization's political waterline visible so i can avoid it

Make it about verifying identity for email.

Are you willing to say what the domain cost you?

speak an open protocol. ATProto, ActivityPub, whatever, just build interop in.