April 26, 2026
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I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
Friendster rises again: phone-tap friends, Apple-only drama, and a war on follows
TLDR: Mike Carson bought Friendster.com, nabbed the trademark, and relaunched it as an iPhone app where you tap phones to add friends. The community loves the back-to-real-friends idea but is roasting the Apple-only feel, demanding Android, and lobbying hard for a classic public “wall” feature.
The internet’s first big social network just popped out of its time capsule, and the comments are having a field day. Developer Mike Carson scooped up friendster.com for roughly $30k (a mix of Bitcoin and a cash-flowing domain), secured the trademark, and relaunched it as an iPhone app where you must tap phones in real life to become friends. Cue the nostalgia… and the roast. On Hacker News (HN, a tech forum), the top vibe is: kill the “follow” era. One user begged for true friends-only symmetry, calling the follow model the “enshittification” turning point of Facebook. Another loud chorus: where’s Android? “Why no android app?” became the day’s most copy‑pasted dunk, followed by complaints that the website asks for an Apple login—cue cries of gatekeeping.
Beyond the platform drama, old-school feature wishes poured in: people miss the semi‑public “wall” where you can post on a friend’s page. Meanwhile, deal sleuths obsessed over the domain’s glow‑up—from being snagged at auction for $7,456 to flipping into Carson’s hands—calling it a vintage internet heist. Memes compared the phone‑tap requirement to “adult friendship bracelets,” and linkers surfaced past threads like Friendster Relaunch and Ask HN: How to make Friendster great?. Verdict: bold vision, spicy execution—now ship Android and bring back the wall, say the commenters.
Key Points
- •Friendster.com was registered on March 22, 2002; the site went offline in 2015 and the company shut down in 2018.
- •In October 2023, Mike Carson saw friendster.com resolving with ads and identified the owner via WHOIS.
- •The previous owner bought friendster.com for $7,456 at a gname.com expired domain auction and was earning ad revenue.
- •Carson acquired friendster.com through a deal of $20,000 in Bitcoin plus a revenue-generating domain, then secured Friendster trademarks on May 13, 2025.
- •Carson built an iOS app for Friendster where users can only add friends by tapping phones together in person.