Most of what I know about Friendster comes from listening to the Startup podcast.
https://gimletmedia.com/episode/friendster-part-1-season-5-e...
Orkut was for ages invite only. And thus became a ghetto consisting of Brazilian and Indian users. Expanding within some limited circles.
Facebook faced scaling problems in the early days too. But they believed in it and invested heavily to solve it.
One of the things that FB got right was exactly this one. Am not sure how they did it, maybe because they started from highly educated places in the US and that set the tone for everyone who joined later.
The founder of Friendster believed that the "degrees of bacon" chain was a critical feature. That chain is incredibly expensive to calculate for very large graphs, and produced multi-second page loads. In retrospect, the obvious answer is "drop that feature"; Facebook does fine without it. But Friendster product management thought it was the secret sauce... and maybe it was a reasonable thing to think back in 2002? Dunno, but it sank the company.
Most of what I know about Friendster comes from their #3 and #6 employees (friends).