A new guard of startups is racing to bring back the 'old internet'

Getty Images; Tyler Le/BITrends from the 2000s and 2010s aren't just showing up in fashion.Tech startups are also trying to resuscitate early internet vibes and aesthetics.Founders, scholars, and tech insiders described the new wave of nostalgia.Relics of the "old internet" are respawning in new social media startups.Myspace's profiles, Tumblr's vibes, StumbleUpon's spontaneity, Twitter's status updates — they're being reinvented by a new guard of startup founders.What's fueling it? Nostalgia for the internet they grew up with.Zehra Naqvi said she misses "how seemingly small" the earlier days of the internet felt. She's the founder of Lore, a platform that aims to help fandoms discover content and connect over their obsessions.As an avid Tumblr user in her teens, the platform's waning relevance was a "huge part of the reason I even wanted to found the company," she told Business Insider.Other platforms, like the newsletter and social network Perfectly Imperfect, explicitly address a similar longing for an internet of the past."Do you miss the old internet?" its website says. "Before AI, soulless algo curation, psychopathic CEOs, and slop content took over?"Ysabel Gerrard, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield, said trends typically cycle through roughly 20 years, and so a "a mid-2000s nostalgia is bang on time.""One of the most powerful ways nostalgia manifests is by getting us to perceive the past as a simpler time," Gerrard said. "This same logic applies to tech nostalgia: we miss the days when our phones were dumb, everything was wired, and we weren't all quite so connected."A 2024 Harris Poll survey of about 1,000 Gen Z adults in the US found that almost half of respondents said they wished social media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, and X (formerly Twitter) were "never invented." And 21% said they wished the smartphone had never been invented.In conversations with founders in this new cohort of social media companies, you can feel a longing for a digital experience that's not quite as grim as what we have now. Startups are swooping in with the promise of bringing users back to an internet that was more weird, fun, and social.Going back to the 2000s and 2010sPerfectly Imperfect, which launched its PI.FYI app in 2024, immediately triggers memories of Myspace with its profile design, while the platform's content and atmosphere conjure Tumblr with posts about music, movies, and other topics.Here's what the Perfectly Imperfect (PI.FYI) feed looks like on desktop.Screenshot/Sydney Bradley; BI/PI.FYI"People are talking about what they love, and I think that creates such a unique feeling on the site," said Tyler Bainbridge, cofounder of Perfectly Imperfect. "That's how I remember the internet being in my youth, before things were charged towards engagement bait."There are also apps like Noplace, which mimics the Myspace days, and Cosmos, which describes itself as a "discovery search engine for creatives" and draws inspiration from Tumblr and Pinterest. Retro, a photo-sharing app built by ex-Instagram employees, brings back the original intention behind Instagram: sharing photos.Meanwhile, Tumblr itself is having a resurgence with Gen Z. About half of the app's monthly active users are Gen Z, Tumblr told Business Insider earlier this year. Digg, a news aggregation app from the aughts, was recently revived. And even Meta's Facebook and Instagram are getting in on the nostalgia, with Mark Zuckerberg's goal to bring back "OG Facebook" and Instagram's dabbling in Myspace-like features such as songs for profiles.Noplace has several Myspace-like features, including a take on its "top 8" friends.Screenshot/Apple App Store/NoplaceSo, why are people so hungry for this era?"Consumers are starting to get fatigued right now by social media," said Walid Mohammed, who runs a TikTok content marketing agency, The Breadwinners Club.The social networks that paved the way have become less and less social. For instance, Meta recently revealed that time spent viewing friends' content on Instagram was down to 7% in 2025.Amber Atherton, a partner at VC firm Patron and author of The Rise of Virtual Communities, said that because "there isn't really a social network anymore," people are rediscovering and reinventing tech from the past.There's also AI."We're in a period of time in tech right now where a lot of things feel very uncomfortable, I think that's a byproduct of AI," said Andy McCune, cofounder of Cosmos. "There's this human nostalgia back for the days when we felt like our tools were cozy and they weren't having such a hold on us."Nostalgia is en vogueNostalgia is "really in," said Mohammed, who has worked with startups like Lore, Sitch (an AI dating app), and Status (an AI social media simulation)."It unlocks memories in people," he added.Deploying comparisons is one way to trigger that feeling, Mohammed said. "It's one of our frameworks that we do across all of our apps," he said. "For example, this app is a love child of X and Y."Cosmos has done this in its TikTok marketing, such as a recent video that says that "if you combine" Tumblr and Pinterest, you get Cosmos. McCune said the app also incorporates nostalgia into some of its copywriting. @inspirethecosmos favorite type of math #cosmos #pinterest #tumblr ♬ original sound - Cosmos "Where you start with marketing is examining the culture, identifying what people need and what they're craving, and then making the story for your product a solution for that," Lore CMO Evan Santiago said.It's not just marketing. It's also infiltrating design.Early internet aesthetics, which art and fashion historian Robert Ossant described as "messy profiles, glitter fonts, custom skins and endless customisation," are coming back.This helps explain some of the trends surrounding the revival of profile customization, as seen on platforms like PI or Noplace."The rise of lo-fi digital aesthetics, from pixel art to deliberately clunky website layouts, echoes the rawness of early internet culture," Ossant said. "Rejecting the algorithm optimised and perceived perfection of this era is a cry for help — a wish to opt out."But just because we miss a moment in time doesn't mean everything we attribute to it is true."I think there's this belief, and potentially a misguided belief, that the early internet was not about money, it was not about influence, it was not about a very curated version of yourself," said University of Pittsburgh assistant professor Frances Corry.Instead, people remember the early internet as being about community, friends, creativity, and fun, Corry said. But that's not all there is to it."It might also be a way that we're trying to rebrand startups away from the techlash," she said.Read the original article on Business Insider

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A new guard of startups is racing to bring back the 'old internet'

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