alt Hacker NewsI bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
Comments
>I don’t really care about making money from [$project], but I’d like it to eventually pay for itself.
Warning bells. Slippery slopes. I think we should know by now that social networks do not mix well with the advertising business model. It would have been nice to see that eventuality ruled out explicitly here (PS: for the future as well as just for now).
Well, I'm an android user, so no onramp for me... not to mention, I prefer to use my desktop, where I can actually see the screen better.
I just made a similar idea focused on games only with people next to you, https://lorehex.co/ can you reach out to me and we can connect? my website and contact info at jperla.com
That's so cool. I would have expected for the domain to go for hundreds of thousands or millions, or, more likely, not not be purchasable for some reason. I can see a future where google.com is purchased for fun by some robot in 200 years.
Bought Friendster, posted about it on Medium. Can't wait for the Justin.tv live stream!
I have the highest hopes for this. At the same time, I can’t help but be skeptical of the claims for no ads / no data selling lasting -forever-.
Build the platform, then find out how to make money on it later.
I have sliver of idea for social media based on curiosity and knowledge tidbits.
Each user gives itself some field of interest, maybe its makeup, maybe its molecular biology, maybe it's something else. Then the system finds similar people with same interests. There are no subreddits with abusive moderators, no rigid containers. Just that you get content you are interested in based on genuine people. Then you can like talk to them about these things or see them posting about the stuff
and you get separate feeds for each kind of stuff,probably ai categorization
Related: Friendster Relaunch (28 points, 3 days ago, 14 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883307
Ask HN: How to make Friendster great? (98 points, 11 months ago, 141 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053119
Who visits those long expired domains to generate ad revenue? People nostalgic? People who hear this Friendster thing and want to check out what they are doing now?
Probably being pedantic, but this is not buying Friendster to be precise, usually what is meant by that is that the company was bought.
In this case the domain Friendster.com was bought, and a trademark was conceded (a new different trademark), I don't know precisely the implications of the trademark though, I think it's a different trademark and you still cannot imply that you are a continuation of the previous trademark holder, it's just that you are given monopoly over that word as a trademark.
Now, is that different than buying "Friendster"? A really interesting legal question, I think it is, and I think it has relevant implications, I don't think you can for example restore the website as it was and pretend a continuation as you would if you bought the company.
Off topic, kind of, but this was genuine and genuinely nice to read.
We don’t need another company to hold our data and then change its mind later for the correct price.
Make the social network private, end to end encrypted, not harvested by your servers
The tap-to-connect constraint makes this work. Every social network removes friction; this one keeps it on purpose. Won't scale to billions, but maybe that's the point.
i bought friendster for 30k, heres what it taught me about b2b sales
I visit the side but I don't have handphone so it seems like I get DQ-ed immediately. If the apps works on web will be nice.
The real social network has become WhatsApp - lots of small private groups with nothing in them but messages from people in the group.
Forcing phone tab to add friend is genius kills boots and fake account instantly every social network dies due to fake connections.
I haven't tried it but meeting functionality for smaller groups would be good, specially for different kinds of hobby meetups.
Love it!!! Businesses that have genuine passion like these are the ones that really blow up…or die :-)
I have to ask, what is the difference between this and private WhatsApp groups?
> Friendster was the first social network
Friendster was not the first social network.
sixdegrees.com had it beat by 5 years.
I had this exact app idea back in 2019, but never got around to building it. Nice work!
Can you please make it (and keep it) so that friendships are symmetrical? I.e., "friend" rather than "follow". IMO that's the enshittification inflection point of Facebook.
I love the internet.
This will be the ONLY social media my kids are allowed to use.
What a lovely idea. My wife and I also met on OkCupid. I hope someone taps my phone and gets me on here.
app is snappy and solid. missing a “invite friends” link… i know the point is in person, i’m with two people in person but had to go back to app store to find a share link.
Hi, congrats on the launch!
Firstly, it doesn’t seem to work for me and my wife - we hold the phones together but clicking start does nothing (and we’ve accepted Bluetooth etc).
Secondly, I wonder if you’ll have a massive chicken and egg issue with the physical feature. I get it’s the main feature but could you overcome it somehow initially while still maintaining your long term “gimmick”? Like could you allow people to connect with the first X friends (5? 10? 20? Whatever that can get virality and flywheel going) or connect with as many as you want virtually for the first X months etc. You could even have the contacts fade away slowly if they don’t get verified in person etc. You might want to model out different strategies (and be extremely conservative) otherwise you’ll be relying on lottery-level luck. Good luck anyway though :)
Sounds like a good usecase for WebNFC.
Some people clearly believe if you have money sitting in a bank, other people should be able to take it. They feel your money should help others. If you're not actively using it.
The plot of Anaconda 2025, but Friendster.
The tapping phones thing really limits the utility of this, and I suspect gives away something about the age of the author - as one gets older, friends move away from the place where you originally made friends, often all over the world. Given I'm not allowed to connect with most of my friends via friendster, there doesn't seem to be much point in creating an account.
Good luck with this.
I run an iOS-only app that Serves a small, specific demographic (and is free. It does not generate any revenue). It’s been shipping for a bit over two years, and has just over 1,000 users. I seriously doubt it will ever get more than a couple of thousand (a rounding error, for most folks around here). I did test it with 12,000 users, so it should handle the anticipated load.
I am writing the 2.0 version, now. I think I’ll add the “tap to connect” feature, and probably QR codes, as well.
Maybe you could get together with the SpaceHey guy:
This is an awesome idea!
+1 for an android app
Do we actually need social networks?
These, to me, feel like artifacts of a bygone era, now replaced by the boiled down version - group chats with friends. Telegram has every feature you need in a platform and you get the joy of "circles" as one poster mentioned, by simply having different group chats.
Plus it's not exposed to the public.
thanks for bringing it back!
Wow. Yes. Thank you!
> I’d like it to eventually pay for itself [...] — but that’s a problem for later.
Hard pass from me dawg. If you don't know the business model now, folks like me are tired of trusting their data to randos on the internet without a plan for sustainability. Guaranteed to end up being just another data farm.
Neat you got the domain tho.
this is awesome. godspeed. or should i say friendspeed
Friendster is a damaged brand, but the marketing and recognition is there for free when it does do something, news outlets will likely give them more then 30k$ worth of advertisement.
Most ridiculous part of the story -> You can still make money from ADs in 2026.
>only way to make friends is actually make friends
Good luck to the app, but I'll never use this.
The overwhelming majority of people I know with whom I want to have long digital conversations with are also a minimum of 500 kilometers away from me.
> So I created an iOS app
CTRL-F "android" "linux" "git" 0 results
sigh
PLEASE if you are developing only for the Mac ecosystem, you should be required to put (Mac only) in your title so the rest of us don't completely WASTE our time.
Heya. At first I wanted to pile on the negativity due to really. Really bad red flags from the title alone signaling slop, sociopathy (calculated sensationalism), sociopathy (guiltless artificial scarcity peddler), and some really big "Gretchen stop trying to make Friendster 2 happen" energy. But as a longtime HN lurker who lost my first account and now have to carry the "account created after 2022" stigma when I had been training GPTs in my own slop in 2018, I value a storied post history pre-dead internet and it may be your best investment yet. (also you have shared positive posts about some things I like).
So just wanted to say I am rooting for you and I may be able to provide some acutely specific but embarrassing input(s) about how a Friendster 2 can happen, based on my Friendster 0 experience (it is definitely not about breaking up in high school where deleting profiles sends the news rippling to the whole universe) (it may involve learning that Indonesian black hats were scary and many and also how the social graph was uncached and always computed server side per profile visit). Now that you own the "Friendster" trademark, I hereby greenlight your soci-emdash-ability to manipulatively hint at the "possibility" of restoring profiles via the Friendster archive project, but keep it as a possibility until you big enough the patent trolls be phone tapping (this is really weird)
Interesting project. I bought the domain name for a startup I worked for in the early 2000s. It was just there to be bought from the regular registrar process -- no need to bid or pay more than a few $. This article makes me want to do something with it. I don't own the trademark.
Have you spent much time thinking about how the feed will work? Balancing the “quality” and enjoyment with the prioritization of “people you met in person”. I’m sure I’m far from the only one who misses the old Facebook feed, but curious what a modern take on that would look like.