๐ฑ The Apps That Came Back Without Their Coats — Woody Magazine, May. 17, 2026
The Apps That Came Back Without Their Coats
On a single day in April, Vine returned without AI, and Friendster without algorithms. Their targets differed. Their destination did not.
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On April 29, 2026, two long-dead social networks reopened their doors on the same day. Vine, the six-second video app that once stamped a format onto the internet, returned as Divine. Friendster, the social network that predated Facebook, returned as an iOS-only app. The original companies had shut down in 2017 and 2015 respectively — an eight-year and an eleven-year absence.
The coincidence of timing was too tidy to dismiss. But the enemy each app set out to refuse was different.
Friendster’s enemy is the algorithm. Mike Carson, a Philadelphia-based programmer, noticed in 2023 that the long-dormant domain had begun resolving again. He tracked down the buyer who had picked it up at an expired-domain auction, and paid roughly thirty thousand dollars for the domain and trademarks combined. The app he then built opens to an empty screen. There are no suggested accounts, no follow recommendations, no advertisements, no bots. The only way to add a friend is to meet them in person and tap your phones together; NFC briefly links the devices, and the connection is made. A friend you fail to physically meet for a year softens through a feature Carson calls a Fading Connection. Within three days of its launch, Friendster sat at No. 2 on the free-apps chart in Apple’s U.S. App Store.
Divine’s enemy is newer. It is artificial intelligence — more precisely, the bottomless tide of machine-generated content the industry has begun calling “AI slop.” The app is financed by and Other Stuff, a nonprofit collective led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and was built by Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter engineer. Every video must either be recorded inside the app or pass through verification tooling from the Guardian Project, a human-rights NGO whose system checks whether a clip was actually shot on a physical phone. Machines, in other words, have been enlisted to certify that other machines did not make the video. The original six-second loop survives intact, and roughly five hundred thousand archived Vines — preserved by the volunteer collective Archive Team after Twitter pulled the plug — loop again inside the new app.
The two apps refuse different enemies but arrive at the same place: a social network where humans make what other humans see. Friendster removes the algorithm that decides who you encounter; Divine removes the machine that produces what you watch. Different doors, one room. They join a quiet field of recent contenders. BeReal, which once climbed to seventy-three million monthly users before deflating into the low thirties, has stabilized around forty million, with Gen Z accounting for seventy-eight percent of the base. Pixelfed, an open-source alternative to Instagram, launched its official mobile app earlier this year and logged ten thousand downloads in two days. And in 2024, illustrators left Instagram en masse for Cara, a platform that explicitly forbids AI training on its uploads.
And yet, in the very same month, something pointed firmly in the opposite direction. On May 8, Meta ended the opt-in end-to-end encryption that had been available for Instagram direct messages since 2023 — the setting that prevented even Meta itself from reading users’ messages. A company spokesperson cited low adoption and directed users seeking more privacy to WhatsApp. The decision quietly opens a door: advertising algorithms, and the AI models trained alongside them, can now reach into what was once a sealed conversation. On one side of this spring, social media is taking more from its users; on the other, those same users are trying to see less of it. Both shifts accelerated at once.
One assumption is worth correcting here. The algorithmic feed is not the natural state of social media; it was added later. Instagram switched from chronological to algorithmic in March 2016, with full rollout by June. Facebook had made the same move in 2009, Twitter in 2016. The algorithm, in other words, is a coat the medium put on roughly a decade into its life — to keep its users from leaving the room. The two apps that came back last month are the same medium with that coat set down again.
From Korea, the shift can feel like someone else’s story. Instagram remains the country’s dominant platform, with 25.6 million users and a 78.8 percent in-app usage rate, according to mobile-data firm WiseApp. And yet, within the same market, Facebook’s monthly usage fell from twenty-seven percent to eighteen percent in a single year — a nine-point drop — according to Gallup Korea’s 2024 survey. On April 24, the Korean daily Kyunghyang Shinmun covered a Stanford University study of thirty-six thousand participants in which users aged eighteen to twenty-four who paused their Instagram and Facebook accounts showed measurable improvement in emotional well-being. The thought experiment of seeing social media with its coat off, then, is one that travels — even on a Sunday afternoon in Seoul.
- 「Source ↗」 TechCrunch — Divine launches to the public (April 29, 2026)
- 「Source ↗」 Social Media Today — Vine / Divine comeback details
- 「Source ↗」 The Register — Friendster rises from the grave (April 27, 2026)
- 「Source ↗」 Cybernews — Mike Carson interview
- 「Source ↗」 MacRumors — Instagram DM encryption ends May 8 (May 5, 2026)
- 「Source ↗」 ACS Information Age — Meta abandons privacy vision (May 12, 2026)
- 「Source ↗」 Kyunghyang Shinmun — Stanford 36,000-user detox study (April 24, 2026)
- 「Source ↗」 Gallup Korea — Content and SNS usage across 18 services
- 「Source ↗」 WiseApp — Korean SNS app usage report
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