The founder of Orkut, the social network that defined online friendship for a generation of users in Brazil and India before Google shut it down in 2014, has asked the public to help bring it back, launching a petition and an appeal built around a simple claim: the internet should help people find their people.
In a message posted this week, Orkut Buyukkokten said that as artificial intelligence changes how people connect, he keeps returning to what made building the original network worthwhile: knowing there is a real person on the other side of every message. He described a different future for the internet, built around real people rather than algorithms, eyeballs and time-on-site optimisation, and asked supporters to add their names and share a supporter card with someone they would want to bring along.
The language of the appeal, friendship, community and a place to belong, is a deliberate contrast with the engagement metrics that dominate today’s platforms. Orkut was built around communities and networks of like-minded people, and its founder argues that many users still miss exactly that: a social space organised around shared interests and genuine connection rather than an algorithmically ranked feed competing for attention.
The timing is not accidental. Public frustration with the major platforms, over advertising load, recommendation algorithms, AI-generated content and the erosion of chronological, friend-based feeds, has produced a steady market for alternatives promising a calmer social web. A revival led by the original founder, trading on one of the most affectionately remembered names of the early social internet, starts with brand recognition that new competitors spend years trying to buy. In Brazil especially, where Orkut was a cultural phenomenon, the name alone carries enormous nostalgic weight, and in India it was many users’ first social network.
Scepticism is equally warranted, and the history here is instructive. This is not the founder’s first attempt to rebuild what Orkut represented. His later venture, Hello, launched in 2016 as an interest-based social network built on loves, not likes, asking users to choose personas reflecting their passions and earning karma as they participated. It found an audience, including more than a million downloads in Brazil, but it did not recreate the original’s scale, and the social market has only consolidated further since.
That consolidation is the core commercial problem any revival faces. Social networks are winner-take-most businesses: their value lies in everyone already being there, and persuading hundreds of millions of people to rebuild their social graphs elsewhere, however warm their memories, is the hardest problem in consumer technology. A petition measures affection, not migration. What it can do is demonstrate demand to partners and investors, and give a launch a founding community of true believers rather than an empty room.
There are also practical questions the announcement does not yet answer: who would own and fund the new service, whether the Orkut name and brand can be used freely, what the product actually does differently at the level of features rather than philosophy, and how a network promising authentic human connection would handle moderation, privacy and the economics that pushed its predecessors toward algorithmic feeds in the first place.
None of that diminishes the signal in the response. Twelve years after shutdown, a one-line appeal from its founder is news across two continents. Whether or not Orkut returns, the appetite it reveals, for a social internet that feels smaller, friendlier and more human, is real, and the largest platforms ignore it at their peril.
