You heard? The old Myspace is back. A kind of.
Coded entirely by an 18-year-old man from Germany named An, Spacehey is almost a carbon copy of the design of the OG social network in its heyday in the early 2000s. According to Vice, the new network, which looks entirely like the old network, launched in November last year and has so far attracted about 55,000 users worldwide.
A deputy said he wants to create a social network that offered better privacy and allowed users to be more creative.
“Thanks to my older friends and the internet, I’ve heard a lot about [Myspace]. I came to the conclusion that you don’t find such a thing nowadays “, said An.
He spent his free time during quarantine, researching the archives on the Internet to make Spacehey look as authentic as possible with the classic version of Myspace.
And to the nails.
Myspace has been restarted before, but never with the original look. That made it appealing, and Spacehey recreates it almost perfectly.
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Spacehey offers some features that the original Myspace didn’t have, such as the option to add links to other social media profiles on Twitter and other platforms that didn’t exist then. You can embed content from Spotify and YouTube that didn’t exist then. There is even a section with pre-made, user-created layouts if you don’t feel like coding everything from scratch – although that’s half the fun of having a Myspace, er, Spacehey.
But all the basics of classic Myspace are there. Friend space. Blogs. Interests. Comments. Even the little “online now” label. If you feel a little inspired, use Spacehey corentin has a playlist other users who have completely adorned their profiles with fun fonts, bright neon colors and animations almost too nostalgic to be manipulated.
One says that Spacehey is more than a Myspace clone. He is very active on the platform, responding directly to user complaints and is not afraid to throw the hammer at anyone who spreads hate speech and harassment on the network. This is not only a welcome change of pace in the overall landscape of social media, but is also in direct contrast to the approach that Facebook and Twitter have taken over the years when dealing with misinformation and hate groups.
Myspace taught me a lot. It taught me how to use HTML and that overloading your page with bright text and automatically played music made for a poor user experience. He taught me how to deal with creepers slipping into my DMs. But most of all, it was such a necessary refuge for the ruling parents who liked to hide my text messages and listen to my phone calls when all I wanted was privacy. I’ve been looking for an alternative on Facebook for years, and Spacehey has potential.
Of course, there are concerns about how viable a return to an old social network can be once the novelty of nostalgia disappears. For example, there is no Spacehey app, so if you want to access it on your phone, you’ll need to use your browser. But I like that. I miss the first days of mobile phones that couldn’t connect to the internet, which made it so easy to disconnect from social commitments for days, even weeks. Spacehey could end up being a niche social networking platform for a particular user (say, a millennium older), but that’s okay.
My Spacehey page needs a lot of work. But I had a lot of fun with my old Photobucket account, where I saved all the menus and wallpapers I made for my old MySpace. It is such a unique time capsule of the interests of my younger self: my obsession with CSI, Zach Braff in Garden State (my adult self no longer understands this), small icons I made for some of my favorite albums from Icon of Coil, A Perfect Circle and Don Hertzfeldt’s short film Rejected. I’m still like my teenage self in some ways, but obviously I’ve grown a lot since then.
It may not rise to the TikTok heights of popularity, but Spacehey’s return to cleaning up a social media profile was fun and creative. And I’m having fun.