Friendster, the OG social network is back — but with one surprising rule to join

Before the age of Myspace and Facebook, there was Friendster. In 2002, the social networking service was founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003. Over the years, Friendster lost traction with its users and permanently shut down in 2015. More than a decade later, Friendster was revived by Mike Carson, who promoted the social media network with a whole new makeover. On May 1, as per an Instagram post by @straits_times, Carson said the new Friendster has no advertisements and no algorithms but comes with one surprising new way to "connect."

The one rule

Friendster is available as an iOS app, but there is one rule users must follow if they want to add friends. A blank space will pop up after one has created a new account. There will be no feed, no suggestions of people they might know. The platform is built so that the only way to add friends is by tapping each other's phones physically while the app is open. The purpose of this feature is to ensure that only people who know each other in real life can connect.

Carson plans to add a 'Friends of Friends' feature, which would allow a user to add another person online only if they share real-life mutuals. He is also planning to add the 'Fading Connection' feature, which is a nudge notification to inform users that they have not been in the same room with the friend for more than a year.

What happened to the old Friendster?

After Friendster was launched, other social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook came out, and it slowly began to lose popularity. It was eventually sold to a Malaysian company, as it still had an audience in Asia. The platform was later turned into a social gaming website in 2011, but was completely shut down four years later, until Carson noticed in 2023 that the website was working again. 

He immediately reached out to the owner and learned that it had been bought for $7,456 at an expired domain auction. Taking a risk, Carson then purchased the site for $20,000 in Bitcoins, also acquiring another domain that generated him $9,000 a year. After a long legal process, he secured the trademark for Friendster in 2025. He also posted about it on his X account.

During its peak, Friendster had 115 million registered users and 19 million monthly page views during its peak. But over the years, Friendster users pivoted to other sites to maintain their virtual connections.

Friendster is not the only social networking site that is coming back this year. Vine, now renamed diVine, is coming back with the help of former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey. The description on the app store claims that diVine will "make six-second loops, discover real people, and fall back in love with the kind of internet that felt alive. Weird, funny, spontaneous, brilliant. No AI slop. All human."

'Not for financial gain'

Carson also wrote in the blog post that the reason he revived Friendster was not for financial gain. "I don’t really care about making money from Friendster, but I’d like it to eventually pay for itself. I’ll probably offer a paid plan for premium features down the road — but that’s a problem for later." His main reason for creating the social networking site is that he and his wife met on OkCupid. He believed, "Websites like that genuinely change the course of people’s lives — people meet, fall in love, build families. That’s incredible to me. If Friendster helps even a few people find that kind of connection, it will have been worth it."

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