Ask HN: How to Make Friendster Great?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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?).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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'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.

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.

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.

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

Revenue is from subscriptions or advertising?