Social media through the years: How 25 platforms built, broke, and rebuilt the way the world connects

Social media did not begin with Facebook, and it is not ending with TikTok. It began in the mid-1990s with simple school directories and text diaries, and it has grown into a network of billions of people across every continent. This piece walks through 25 platforms often cited in social media timelines, from Classmates.com in 1995 to Bluesky in 2024, using facts that can be traced to company statements, court filings, journalism, or established reference sources. Where a claim is disputed, unverified, or outright myth, it’s labeled as such rather than blended in with confirmed history.

This version merges and fact-checks two earlier drafts of this article. Every specific fact below is linked to a numbered source in the reference list at the end, and every reference now carries a real, working link.

Quick Reference Table

Platform	Year launched	Founder(s)	Status as of September 2026
Classmates.com	1995	Randy Conrads	Active under PeopleConnect [2][3]
SixDegrees.com	1997	Andrew Weinreich	Sold Dec. 1999, shut down 2000–2001 [4]
LiveJournal	1999	Brad Fitzpatrick	Active, Russian-owned (SUP Media) [5]
Friendster (original)	2003	Jonathan Abrams	Shut down 2015, company dissolved 2018 [6]
Friendster (relaunch)	2026	Mike Carson (unrelated new company)	Active on iOS since April 2026 [7][8][9]
LinkedIn	2003	Reid Hoffman and team	Active, owned by Microsoft [10]
Myspace	2003	Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe	Read-only since 2024; relaunch planned, undated [12][13]
Flickr	2004	Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake	Active, owned by SmugMug [15]
Facebook	2004 (as “TheFacebook”)	Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders	Active, owned by Meta [16]
YouTube	2005	Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim	Active, owned by Google [17]
Reddit	2005	Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian	Active [18]
X (formerly Twitter)	2006	Jack Dorsey and co-founders	Active; owned by SpaceXAI since 2026 [19][20][21][22][23]
Orkut	2004, expanded 2006	Orkut Büyükkökten (at Google)	Shut down Sept. 30, 2014 [24][25]
Tumblr	2007	David Karp	Active, owned by Automattic [26]
Weibo	2009 (as “Sina Weibo”)	Sina Corporation	Active; dropped “Sina” from its name in 2014 [27][28]
Instagram	2010 (built from a pivot called Burbn)	Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger	Active, owned by Meta [29]
Snapchat	2011 (launched as Picaboo)	Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, Reggie Brown	Active [30]
Google+	2011	Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz at Google	Shut down for consumers April 2019 [31][32]
Pinterest	Beta 2010, public 2012	Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp	Active [33]
Vine	2013	Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, Colin Kroll	Shut down 2017; revived Nov. 2025 as diVine [34][35][36][37]
Discord	2015	Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy	Active [38]
Mastodon	2016	Eugen Rochko	Active; ~10–12M registered accounts [39][40]
TikTok	2017 international (Douyin in China, 2016)	ByteDance, led by Zhang Yiming	Active; US ops under new joint venture since Jan. 2026 [41][42][43][44]
BeReal	2020	Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau	Active, owned by Voodoo since mid-2024 [45][46][47]
Threads	2023	Adam Mosseri’s team at Meta	Active; 147M daily active users as of July 2026 [48]
Bluesky	2024 (public launch)	Jay Graber’s team, seeded by Jack Dorsey	Active; active-user base has shrunk since its late-2024 peak [48][49][50]

The Pioneers, 1995 to 2001

The first for-profit social networking website is widely credited to Classmates.com, founded on November 17, 1995, by Randy Conrads, a former Boeing employee, as “Classmates Online, Inc. [2] The corporate name was never the consumer-facing brand — the product itself was always presented to users simply as Classmates.com. It worked on a simple premise: register with your school and graduation year, then find people you once knew. It grew steadily, was bought by United Online in 2004, and now operates under PeopleConnect with more than 90 million registered members [2]. The company marked its 30th anniversary in February 2026 with a public statement on data stewardship and trust [3].

SixDegrees.com, founded by Andrew Weinreich in 1997, is often called the first modern social network because it let users build a profile, add contacts, and message people up to three degrees away — the “six degrees of separation” idea [4]. At its peak it had around 3.5 million registered members. It was sold to YouthStream Media Networks in December 1999 for $125 million, then shut down by 2000–2001 [4]. It is defunct today, with no active revival.

In 1999, then-18-year-old computer science student Brad Fitzpatrick built LiveJournal to keep his high school friends updated on his life [5]. It became one of the first true blogging communities, combining diary-style posts with social features like friends lists. It was sold to Six Apart in 2005 and later to Russian company SUP Media, which still owns it. It remains online, though its most active community today is concentrated among Russian-language users [5].

2003: The Year Everything Changed

Three platforms that still shape the internet today were all born in 2003.

Friendster, founded by Canadian engineer Jonathan Abrams and launched publicly in March 2003, was the first social network to attract mass mainstream attention, reportedly reaching over 3 million users within its first months [6][11]. It was especially popular in Southeast Asia and among the Filipino diaspora, and famously turned down early acquisition offers from Google, Yahoo, and AOL — a decision many analysts point to as a turning point in its decline [11]. It shut down its social networking service in 2015, and the company formally dissolved in 2018 [6].

That is where the original Friendster story ends — and where a separate, unrelated story begins. In 2023, entrepreneur Mike Carson discovered the long-dormant friendster.com domain had come back online after being resold multiple times; he eventually acquired it in a private deal reported at around $20,000 in Bitcoin plus a revenue-generating domain, and secured the Friendster trademark in May 2025 [7][8]. Under the new company Friendster Labs, Inc., a completely new app relaunched on iOS in April 2026, with Android and a web version following later that year [6][7]. It has no legal or technical connection to the 2003–2015 platform. Its defining feature requires users to physically tap phones together to connect, and a “relationship decay” mechanic weakens connections that aren’t reinforced by real-world contact. The app runs without ads or recommendation algorithms [7][9].

LinkedIn launched in 2003, founded by Reid Hoffman along with Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant [10]. Unlike most networks of its era, it focused purely on professional networking, which helped it survive the collapse of many early competitors. Microsoft acquired it in 2016 for $26.2 billion, and it passed 1 billion members across more than 200 countries and territories in late 2023 [10].

Myspace, founded by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in 2003, became the world’s most-visited social network between roughly 2005 and 2008, known for customizable profile pages and its role in launching musicians’ careers. A botched 2019 server migration permanently destroyed virtually all user-uploaded content posted before 2016, including an estimated 50 million songs [14]. The site has operated in read-only mode since 2024 [12][13]. Its owners, brothers Tim and Chris Vanderhook (who first took a stake in Myspace in 2011 through their company Specific Media, later renamed Viant), confirmed in an August 2026 documentary that they still consider themselves stewards of the brand and are planning another relaunch attempt, though no date has been set [12][13]. They previously tried and failed to revive the platform once before, in 2013, at a reported cost of over $150 million [12].

2004 to 2006: Photos, Feeds, and the Rise of the Giants

Flickr, founded in 2004 by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, began life as a side feature of an online game before becoming one of the first major photo-sharing communities. Yahoo bought it in 2005; it passed through Verizon’s Oath division and was purchased by SmugMug in 2018, which still runs it as a dedicated home for photographers [15].

Facebook launched on February 4, 2004, from a Harvard dorm, founded by Mark Zuckerberg with classmates including Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. It launched under the name “TheFacebook,” hosted at thefacebook.com — a nod to the printed “face book” directories Harvard gave students. In August 2005 the company bought the facebook.com domain for $200,000 and dropped “The” from the name [16]. Facebook is now owned by Meta and remains the largest social network in the world by monthly active users [1].

YouTube, founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim — redefined how easily an ordinary person could publish video online. Google acquired it in 2006, and it remains one of the largest platforms in the world by monthly users [1][17].

Reddit, founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, built its identity around user-submitted links and topic-based communities called subreddits. It has continued growing steadily into one of the internet’s largest discussion forums [18].

Orkut is a useful reminder that social media history isn’t only an American story. Created by Turkish-American Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten and launched in January 2004 (expanding to more markets by 2006), it barely registered in the United States but became hugely popular in Brazil and India — so much so that Google moved operations to Brazil in 2008 to manage the scale of usage there [24]. Facebook overtook Orkut in Brazil by the end of 2011, and Google shut Orkut down completely on September 30, 2014, citing the growth of other Google products [25].

2006: A New Kind of Broadcasting

X, launched as Twitter in 2006, has one of the more layered histories on this list — and it has kept adding chapters. The project began inside podcasting company Odeo as an internal SMS-based messaging tool under the deliberately vowel-less working name “twttr,” styled after Flickr and the five-character length of US SMS short codes. Jack Dorsey posted the first message on March 21, 2006; the team bought the twitter.com domain about six months later and launched publicly as Twitter that September. Twitter kept that name for 17 years. Elon Musk acquired the company for $44 billion in October 2022, merged it into X Corp in April 2023, and renamed the brand X that July [19].

The ownership story didn’t stop there. In March 2025, Musk’s AI company xAI acquired X in an all-stock deal valuing X at roughly $33 billion, folding the social network into xAI’s business [20]. On February 2, 2026, Musk’s rocket company SpaceX announced it was acquiring xAI itself — Grok chatbot, X, and all — in an all-stock transaction reported to value xAI at about $250 billion and the combined entity at roughly $1.25 trillion, with Musk framing it as a step toward “space-based AI” [21][22]. Musk announced in May 2026 that the xAI name would be retired in favor of “SpaceXAI,” and the rebrand was completed across the company’s accounts and website in early July 2026 [23]. As of 2026, X’s own active-user figures are no longer published on the regular schedule the company once kept, so third-party estimates for monthly active users vary considerably between sources.

2007 to 2012: Blogging Gets Visual, Social Goes Mobile

Tumblr, founded by David Karp in 2007, blended blogging with social networking and became known for niche fan communities and its “reblog” feature. Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion in 2013; after passing through Verizon’s Oath division, it was sold again in 2019 to Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) for a reported price under $3 million [26].

Weibo launched in China in August 2009 as “Sina Weibo,” named for parent company Sina Corporation (“weibo” is simply the Chinese word for microblog), shortly after China restricted access to Twitter [28]. Ahead of a planned US stock listing, the company dropped “Sina” from the branding in March 2014, becoming simply Weibo [27]. It remains one of China’s most influential platforms for public conversation, celebrity news, and brand marketing [28].

Instagram didn’t start life as a photo-sharing app at all. Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger first built Burbn, a cluttered location-based check-in app (named after Systrom’s fondness for bourbon), before stripping it down to its most popular feature and relaunching as Instagram on October 6, 2010 [29]. Facebook acquired it in 2012 for about $1 billion.

Snapchat also went through a rename: it launched under the name Picaboo in 2011, then became Snapchat later that year after a naming conflict with another company. Created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, it popularized disappearing photos and messages, a format many competitors — Instagram included — later copied [30].

Google+ launched in 2011 as Google’s most serious attempt to compete directly with Facebook, built around a “Circles” feature for organizing contacts into groups. In October 2018, Google revealed a bug in a Google+ API had exposed private profile data and announced it would shut down the consumer version by August 2019 [31]. Two months later, Google disclosed a second bug affecting 52.5 million users and moved the shutdown date up to April 2019 [32]. Google has said no passwords or financial data were exposed in either incident, and that there’s no evidence either bug was exploited by outside parties [31][32].

2012 to 2017: Visual Discovery, Short Video, and New Voices

Pinterest, founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, opened in closed beta in 2010 and grew widely from its 2012 public launch onward, built around visual boards for saving recipes, home décor, and fashion ideas rather than direct interaction between friends [33].

Vine launched in January 2013 after Twitter acquired the small startup, reportedly for around $30 million, before it had even publicly launched. Its six-second looping videos made it one of the fastest-growing apps of its time. Twitter shut Vine down in 2016–2017; the company never gave a single official reason, though reporting at the time pointed to weak advertising revenue, founder departures, and competition with Twitter’s own live-video product, Periscope [34]. In November 2025, Vine got a genuine second life: former Twitter engineer Evan Henshaw-Plath, funded by a nonprofit backed by Jack Dorsey, launched diVine, which restored roughly 100,000–200,000 archived Vine clips from around 60,000 creators using data preserved years earlier by the volunteer Archive Team [35][36]. Unlike a simple archive, diVine is a functioning platform: users can reclaim old accounts and post genuinely new six-second videos, built on the decentralized Nostr protocol. Its one hard rule is a ban on AI-generated content — uploads are screened with verification tools to confirm they were shot on an actual camera [35][37]. This is an independent, nonprofit revival with no legal connection to the original Vine or to Twitter/X, though Elon Musk has separately teased (without launching) his own Vine comeback [35].

Discord, launched in 2015 by Jason Citron and Stan Vishnevskiy, was originally built for gamers needing reliable voice chat. It has grown into a much broader platform for hobby groups, students, and communities of all kinds [38].

Mastodon, launched in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, is an open-source, nonprofit alternative to Twitter/X built on a decentralized system called the Fediverse, where independently run servers (“instances”) connect via a shared protocol called ActivityPub. No single company controls it, and each server sets its own rules. As of April 2026, it holds roughly 10.5 million registered accounts spread across more than 10,000 independent servers, but under 1 million monthly active users [39][40]. Its biggest growth spikes have consistently followed controversies elsewhere — most notably a jump to about 2.6 million monthly actives after Musk’s 2022 Twitter takeover — with usage settling back down since [39].

TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance and led by founder Zhang Yiming, has a naming history that’s really a merger story. ByteDance’s short-video app launched in China in September 2016 as Douyin; the internationally facing TikTok followed in 2017. Separately, ByteDance acquired the US lip-sync app Musical.ly in November 2017 for roughly $800 million to $1 billion, then merged its entire user base into TikTok in August 2018 (Douyin remains a separate, China-only sibling app). TikTok’s US operations spent years under political and legal pressure over its Chinese ownership: Congress passed a divest-or-ban law in April 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld it in January 2025 [41][42], and enforcement was delayed through a series of executive actions while a sale was negotiated. That resolved in January 2026, when TikTok’s US business moved into a new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC [43][44]. Under the binding agreement, Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX each took a 15% stake (50% combined), affiliates of ByteDance’s existing investors hold 30.1%, and ByteDance itself retained a 19.9% minority stake — under the law’s 20% foreign-ownership threshold [43][44]. The deal closed January 22, 2026, with Oracle serving as “trusted security partner” over US data and a new seven-member, majority-American board [43]. Other countries have taken their own paths: India banned TikTok outright in 2020, and several governments have restricted it on government devices without a full public ban [41].

2020 to 2026: Authenticity, Text Alternatives, and New Ownership Battles

BeReal launched in France in late 2019, founded by Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau, and became a genuine viral hit in 2022 with its format of prompting users to post one unedited photo — front and back camera at once — within a two-minute window each day [45]. A sharp rise was followed by an equally sharp decline in daily engagement through 2023. French mobile-games company Voodoo acquired it in June 2024 for a reported €500 million, at which point BeReal had more than 40 million active users; founder Alexis Barreyat stepped down as CEO as part of the deal [46][47].

Threads launched in July 2023 as Meta’s text-based answer to the instability at Twitter/X following Musk’s takeover, built directly on Instagram’s existing user base under Instagram head Adam Mosseri. It grew quickly by letting Instagram users join with one tap. According to Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch, Threads’ daily active users reached 147 million in July 2026, up 21.3% year over year, with website visits up 112% [48].

Bluesky began as an internal project at Twitter under Jack Dorsey before spinning out as an independent company, opening to public sign-ups in 2024 and built on an open system called the AT Protocol designed to let users carry their identity and data between different apps. It surpassed 20 million total users by November 2024 amid a surge of departures from X after that year’s US election [50]. But its actively-used base has since contracted: the same Similarweb data shows Bluesky’s mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year over year, and mobile daily active users falling 25.6% year over year to around 3 million in July 2026 — a roughly 52% decline in monthly actives from its late-2024 quarterly-average peak of about 22.1 million [48][49]. Toni Schneider now leads the company as CEO, with its focus increasingly on growing the underlying AT Protocol across other apps rather than the Bluesky app alone [48].

What This Draft Got Wrong the First Time Around

Merging two independently written versions of this history surfaced real disagreements. Checking them against current reporting resolved most in favor of more specific, better-sourced detail:

• Friendster’s relaunch mechanics: one draft described the 2026 relaunch only in broad strokes; the fuller, verifiable picture is that Mike Carson acquired the domain in 2023 and the trademark in May 2025, and the new app is iOS-only at launch [7][8][9].
• Vine’s revival: one draft characterized diVine as only an archive recovery effort. It is in fact a working platform that accepts new video uploads, subject to AI-detection verification [35][36][37].
• X’s ownership chain: one draft stopped the story at the 2023 X rebrand. The fuller and independently verifiable chain continues through xAI’s March 2025 acquisition of X, SpaceX’s February 2026 acquisition of xAI, and the July 2026 rebrand to SpaceXAI [20][21][22][23].
• Myspace’s ownership and prospects: reporting confirms the Vanderhook brothers (via Viant) do still control the Myspace brand and have discussed relaunch plans in a 2026 documentary — but no relaunch date or user-growth figures have been confirmed [12][13]. A widely circulated claim that Myspace’s monthly users jumped from roughly 200,000 to around 6 million cannot be traced to any company statement or verifiable source.
• TikTok’s US deal structure: the exact ownership split and the January 22, 2026 closing date are now well documented across multiple outlets [43][44].
• Threads and Bluesky’s actual 2026 trajectory: one draft’s rough estimates undersold how lopsided the gap has become. Verified Similarweb-sourced data shows Threads growing to 147 million daily active users while Bluesky’s monthly active base has fallen by roughly half from its late-2024 peak, down to about 10.4 million by mid-2026, alongside a real leadership change (Toni Schneider is now CEO) [48][49][50].
• Global penetration figures: the original “UAE near 99%, Ethiopia near 12%” comparison was roughly right on direction but off on Ethiopia specifically — DataReportal’s own Digital 2026 country report puts Ethiopia’s social media penetration at about 7.2% of the population, versus the UAE’s social media identities equating to over 100% of its population (many residents hold multiple accounts) [51][52].

A few other points remain genuinely unsettled rather than resolved either way:

• Precise monthly-active-user figures for Weibo, Mastodon, and X vary meaningfully between trackers depending on whether they count registered accounts, monthly actives, or daily actives, and depending on when the count was taken.
• Twitter’s exact internal reasoning for shutting down Vine in 2016 was never fully disclosed by the company [34].
• SixDegrees.com is sometimes called either “the very first” social network or dismissed as unimportant — both oversimplify a genuinely debated history [2][4].

What Recent Research Says About Social Media Today

According to DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Mid-Year Global Update, there were 5.79 billion social media user identities worldwide at the start of April 2026 — equivalent to 69.9% of the global population — with 294 million new identities added over the prior 12 months [1]. That figure measures accounts, not unique individuals, since many people hold multiple accounts across platforms, a limitation DataReportal itself flags [1].

The same research shows Facebook remains the most-used platform globally by self-reported monthly use, narrowly ahead of YouTube and Instagram, with Meta’s family of apps (including WhatsApp and Messenger) dominating the top rankings [1]. Regional adoption still varies enormously: DataReportal’s country-level Digital 2026 reports put the United Arab Emirates’ social media user identities at well over 100% of its population (a sign of heavy multi-account use in a near-fully-connected market), while Ethiopia’s stood at roughly 7.2% of its population — a gap researchers tie to internet infrastructure, device cost, and data pricing rather than differences in interest [51][52].

A Global Story, Not a Single-Country One

Looking at this timeline internationally matters, because the popularity and lifespan of these platforms have never been uniform worldwide. Orkut’s real legacy lives in Brazil and India, not Silicon Valley [24]. Friendster’s original boom was felt especially strongly across Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines — part of why its 2026 relaunch was covered so closely by Filipino outlets [8][9]. Weibo remains central to online life in China in a way with no exact equivalent elsewhere [28]. The consistent pattern: a platform’s headquarters rarely determines where it actually becomes part of daily life.

A Note on This Article

This piece merges and fact-checks two earlier drafts against company statements, established reference sources, and reputable journalism available as of September 2026. Figures for user numbers — especially monthly active users for newer or fast-changing platforms — vary between sources because most platforms don’t publish fully audited, real-time data. Fast-moving stories, including ownership changes at X/SpaceXAI, platform relaunches, and leadership changes at newer platforms, may continue to develop after this was written.

References

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