The old internet is inspiring new startups

It’s not just tamagotchis and low-waisted jeans returning from the early 2000s — the internet itself is also experiencing a Y2K renaissance. 

As today’s platforms bloat into moneymaking, all-in-one super-apps, consumers are increasingly craving the lost simplicity of the early internet. 

A handful of new startups are listening and rushing to serve up the unfiltered, lo-fi experiences missing from today’s online environments, per Business Insider:

• Perfectly Imperfect, founded in 2020 by a former Meta engineer, is a culture newsletter and social media app that brands itself as the “world’s first social magazine.” It has 140k subscribers, including ~2k who pay $6/month for extra content and profile customization options. While the newsletter contains ads, the social media platform — aesthetically and functionally a cross between Tumblr and MySpace — is ad-free.
• Noplace, a Gen Z-inpsired hybrid of Myspace and Twitter, is a colorful but photo-less social media app with a text-based, ad-free feed, where users can connect over shared interests and pin their “top 10” friends. It launched last year with a 500k-person waitlist and quickly topped app store charts. 
• Cosmos, founded in 2024, is an ad-free Pinterest alternative for creatives, where users can save and share images, publicly or privately. It features AI-powered search, but lacks functions like comments, likes, DMs, and notifications.  
• Retro, launched in 2023, recreates the allure of OG Instagram as nothing more than a simple photo-sharing app that it says “feels like a joy, not a habit.”a

Even some of the original blueprints, like Tumblr and Digg, have been making comebacks of their own. 

What’s behind the trend?

Nostalgia is a big factor, per BI. People remember the early internet as being a cozy place of creativity, connection, and exploration. 

Today’s online ecosystem, by contrast, is exhaustively optimized, fueled by algorithms and filled with ads and AI slop — and consumers are as tired of it as they are addicted. 

A 2024 Harris Poll found that ~50% of Gen Z adults wish social media platforms were “never invented,” and 21% wish the same of smartphones.  

Regardless of whether these sweet-and-simple startups ultimately last, or fizzle out as fast as others like BeReal or Clubhouse, they reclaim a disappearing digital space where netizens can, at least briefly, pretend the internet is still a fun place to be.