Social media platforms dominate our culture. It would be extremely difficult to find someone who had never heard of Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. But there used to be a number of other platforms that were once in the running to become the most popular. They just couldn’t keep up with the competition and faded into memory.

In the early days of social media, several platforms fought to create the best social network. Millennials who grew up using these sites and apps might look back on them with nostalgia, but many of them are completely foreign to younger generations. Here are a few of the now-defunct (or in some cases, recently resurrected) social media platforms kids today won’t know anything about:

1. Friendster
2. MySpace
3. Orkut
4. Digg
5. Jaiku
6. Vine

Friendster

Friendster is considered to be one of the first mainstream social networking platforms, and it crawled so that Facebook could run. The platform launched in March of 2002 and focused on providing online communication between “friends,” or users. It became increasingly popular throughout Asia, expanding to over 100 million users in 2011.

Unfortunately, Friendster struggled in American markets. It was not able to keep up with Facebook in terms of social connections between users, and it shut down in 2015. A “new” Friendster recently launched, but it is only for connecting with real-life friends.

MySpace

This may shock you, but MySpace isn’t actually dead. It still exists! However, as The Princess Bride‘s Miracle Max (Billy Crystal) would say, it’s “mostly dead.” And it would take a much larger miracle to bring MySpace back to relevance, so try not to get your hopes up.

MySpace launched in 2003 and became the largest social media platform by 2008, having about 76 million unique visitors per month at its peak. If you were an emo kid, MySpace was the platform you hung out on. But the platform struggled after Facebook gained traction. By 2019, MySpace only had 7 million users, which is still surprising. Those users must be die-hard My Chemical Romance fans, because “[they’re] not okay.”

Orkut

Did you know that Google ran a social media platform at about the same time as Facebook? Orkut, named after the Google employee who created it, Orkut Büyükkökten, started in 2004, just one month before Facebook was founded.

Orkut was popular in Brazil and India, but didn’t gain many users from the rest of the world. It also lost to Facebook because it didn’t have an updating newsfeed or robust security. Orkut shut down in 2014, but Büyükkökten has tried to resurrect it. As of 2026, orkut.com is just a letter from Büyükkökten, asking for people to sign up for news of Orkut’s comeback.

Digg

Most of us are familiar with Reddit and its upvotes (or downvotes), but it was far from the first platform to use that format. Digg launched one year before Reddit, in 2004, and used a system where you could “dig” or “bury” content in your newsfeed. This was one of the first places users could “like” what they were reading.

One reason Digg lost to Reddit was because of a redesign they underwent in 2010. People hated it so much that site traffic dropped 26%. By 2012, Digg was hanging on by a thread and its founders sold it off. Kevin Rose, one of the original founders, bought Digg back and relaunched it in January of 2026, but it was swarmed with AI bots and had to shut down again. It’s currently back up for a third time, but Digg’s history leaves users’ confidence shaky.

Jaiku

Jaiku was a Finnish social platform similar to Twitter, where users could share “jaikus,” or short posts. It was founded just one month before Twitter in 2006, and featured “lifestreaming,” which shared your latest photos and music with your connections.

Google bought Jaiku in 2007, only to neglect it. The site became excessively slow and frustrated users migrated to Twitter. Google announced Jaiku’s shutdown in 2009. It’s sad to know that Jaiku only failed because it wasn’t given a fair chance.

Vine

Six-second videos may sound too short to truly gauge someone’s talent, but Vine launched the careers of quite a few celebrities today. From Shawn Mendes and Jay Versace to Jake and Logan Paul and Thomas Sanders, Vine was where many people first found fame. The Twitter-owned app launched in 2013, but shut down in 2017 after TikTok usurped the short-form video throne.

One of the co-founders of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, brought the app back as DiVine in April 2026. It has all the old Vine videos, and you can create new ones. DiVine also works to share only human-made content, which should help it beat the competition whose platforms are filled with “AI slop.”

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