It’s time to welcome back two social networks we once loved: Friconcludester 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 stated that “people view back” at the era of social media before everything obtained so darn large. People not only miss the features and feel of these old apps, but also that time period.
“It’s very informing that in the launchning of the year, people were viewing back to 2016,” he stated, referring to a social media trconclude 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 rebuild, 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.
Screenshot/Google Play/Divine
Meanwhile, Friconcludester, 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 friconcludes. For example, utilizers can only add new friconcludes by tapping their iPhones in person. (So far, I have a grand total of one friconclude: Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos, who informed me she was an OG Friconcludester fan.)
Carson informed Business Insider that he paid about $30,000 for the Friconcludester domain and trademark.
After being overtaken by the rise of Myspace and then later Facebook, Friconcludester 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.
Unlike DiVine, the new Friconcludester doesn’t have access to any of the prior version’s data or content.
Screenshot/Apple App Store/Friconcludester
What’s old is new again on the internet
I’m not old enough to be on the original Friconcludester, 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 Friconcludester as “a positive and enjoyable experience.”
DiVine and Friconcludester 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 stated it was downsizing its team and rebelieveing 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 obtainting them to migrate can be challenging, Digg’s CEO Justin Mezzell wrote in a letter shared to the platform’s website.
Friconcludester 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 large question: Can they actually build a community?
Tech founders can build new spaces, or reimagine old ones, but obtainting utilizers 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 stated. “It is the community of utilizers that builds these things work.”
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