Relics of the “previous web” are respawning in new social media startups.

Myspace’s profiles, Tumblr’s vibes, StumbleUpon’s spontaneity, Twitter’s standing updates — they’re being reinvented by a brand new guard of startup founders.

What’s fueling it? Nostalgia for the web they grew up with.

Zehra Naqvi stated she misses “how seemingly small” the sooner days of the web felt. She’s the founding father of Lore, a platform that goals to assist fandoms uncover content material and join over their obsessions.

As an avid Tumblr consumer in her teenagers, the platform’s waning relevance was a “big a part of the rationale I even wished to discovered the corporate,” she informed Enterprise Insider.

Different platforms, just like the publication and social community Completely Imperfectexplicitly tackle an analogous eager for an web of the previous.

“Do you miss the previous web?” its web site says. “Earlier than AI, soulless algo curation, psychopathic CEOs, and slop content material took over?”

Ysabel Gerrard, a senior lecturer on the College of Sheffield, stated tendencies sometimes cycle by means of roughly 20 years, and so a “a mid-2000s nostalgia is bang on time.”

“Probably the most highly effective methods nostalgia manifests is by getting us to understand the previous as a less complicated time,” Gerrard stated. “This identical logic applies to tech nostalgia: we miss the times when our telephones have been dumb, every part was wired, and we weren’t all fairly so linked.”

A 2024 Harris Ballot survey of about 1,000 Gen Z adults within the US discovered that nearly half of respondents stated they wished social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and X (previously Twitter) have been “by no means invented.” And 21% stated they wished the smartphone had by no means been invented.

In conversations with founders on this new cohort of social media firms, you possibly can really feel a eager for a digital expertise that is not fairly as grim as what we’ve now. Startups are swooping in with the promise of bringing customers again to an web that was extra bizarre, enjoyable, and social.

Going again to the 2000s and 2010s

Completely Imperfect, which launched its PI.FYI app in 2024, instantly triggers reminiscences of Myspace with its profile design, whereas the platform’s content material and ambiance conjure Tumblr with posts about music, motion pictures, and different subjects.

“Persons are speaking about what they love, and I feel that creates such a novel feeling on the location,” stated Tyler Bainbridge, cofounder of Completely Imperfect. “That is how I bear in mind the web being in my youth, earlier than issues have been charged in direction of engagement bait.”

There are additionally apps like Noplacewhich mimics the Myspace days, and Cosmoswhich describes itself as a “discovery search engine for creatives” and attracts inspiration from Tumblr and Pinterest. Retroa photo-sharing app constructed by ex-Instagram staff, brings again the unique intention behind Instagram: sharing pictures.

In the meantime, Tumblr itself is having a resurgence with Gen Z. About half of the app’s month-to-month lively customers are Gen Z, Tumblr informed Enterprise Insider earlier this 12 months. Digg, a information aggregation app from the aughts, was just lately revived. And even Meta’s Fb and Instagram are getting in on the nostalgia, with Mark Zuckerberg’s aim to convey again “And Fb” and Instagram’s dabbling in Myspace-like options comparable to songs for profiles.

So, why are folks so hungry for this period?

“Shoppers are beginning to get fatigued proper now by social media,” stated Walid Mohammed, who runs a TikTok content material advertising and marketing company, The Breadwinners Membership.

The social networks that paved the way in which have turn out to be much less and fewer social. As an illustration, Meta just lately revealed that point spent viewing mates’ content material on Instagram was all the way down to 7% in 2025.

Amber Athertona associate at VC agency Patron and writer of The Rise of Digital Communities, stated that as a result of “there is not actually a social community anymore,” individuals are rediscovering and reinventing tech from the previous.

There’s additionally AI.

“We’re in a time frame in tech proper now the place quite a lot of issues really feel very uncomfortable, I feel that is a byproduct of AI,” stated Andy McCune, cofounder of Cosmos. “There’s this human nostalgia again for the times once we felt like our instruments have been cozy they usually weren’t having such a maintain on us.”

Nostalgia is en vogue

Nostalgia is “actually in,” stated Mohammed, who has labored with startups like Lore, Sitch (an AI courting app), and Standing (an AI social media simulation).

“It unlocks reminiscences in folks,” he added.

Deploying comparisons is one solution to set off that feeling, Mohammed stated. “It is one in all our frameworks that we do throughout all of our apps,” he stated. “For instance, this app is a love youngster of X and Y.”

Cosmos has performed this in its TikTok advertising and marketing, comparable to a latest video that claims that “should you mix” Tumblr and Pinterest, you get Cosmos. McCune stated the app additionally incorporates nostalgia into a few of its copywriting.

“The place you begin with advertising and marketing is inspecting the tradition, figuring out what folks want and what they’re craving, after which making the story in your product an answer for that,” Lore CMO Evan Santiago stated.

It isn’t simply advertising and marketing. It is also infiltrating design.

Early web aesthetics, which artwork and style historian Robert Ossant described as “messy profiles, glitter fonts, customized skins and infinite customisation,” are coming again.

This helps clarify a number of the tendencies surrounding the revival of profile customization, as seen on platforms like PI or Noplace.

“The rise of lo-fi digital aesthetics, from pixel artwork to intentionally clunky web site layouts, echoes the rawness of early web tradition,” Ossant stated. “Rejecting the algorithm optimised and perceived perfection of this period is a cry for assist — a want to decide out.”

However simply because we miss a second in time doesn’t suggest every part we attribute to it’s true.

“I feel there’s this perception, and probably a misguided perception, that the early web was not about cash, it was not about affect, it was not a few very curated model of your self,” stated College of Pittsburgh assistant professor Frances Corry.

As an alternative, folks bear in mind the early web as being about neighborhood, mates, creativity, and enjoyable, Corry stated. However that is not all there may be to it.

“It may also be a method that we’re attempting to rebrand startups away from the techlash,” she stated.