Have you heard? The old Myspace is back. Sort of. Tens of thousands of people are flocking to a new social website that resurrects the look and feel of MySpace from the early 2000s in all its primordial glory. Created by an 18-year-old German coder identifying himself as ‘An the Maker’, SpaceHey is a faithful recreation of the spartan social experience in the early years of online media, triggering nostalgia in some users and curiosity in others.
Myspace has been rebooted before, but never with the look and feel of the original. That’s what made it appealing, and SpaceHey recreates it almost perfectly. SpaceHey offers a few features the original Myspace lacked, like the option to add links to your other social media profiles on Twitter and other platforms that didn’t exist back then. You can embed content from Spotify and YouTube, which also didn’t exist back then. There’s 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.
MySpace was the most popular social service on the web before Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook surged ahead. In the years since its heyday, Instagram, now also under the Meta umbrella, defined new ways of interacting around images and visuals, Snap Inc.’s Snapchat made ephemeral video clips a sensation and Twitter Inc. turned the retweet into a weapon of mass distraction.
The comparatively barebones SpaceHey has been in development for a year and crossed the 200,000-user mark on Thursday. Its servers buckled under the onslaught of new users as discussion around it picked up across other social media channels.
Part of the attraction may be explained by the absence of intrusive advertising and big corporate overseers. SpaceHey promises “no algorithms, no tracking, and no personalized Ads – Feeds on SpaceHey are chronological and there is no suggested content begging for your attention.”
While the site itself is simple in appearance, users are allowed to customize their profile pages to a high degree, with options including animated backgrounds and custom mouse pointers. It may not skyrocket to TikTok heights of popularity, but SpaceHey is a throwback to when curating a social media profile was fun and creative. And people are having a blast.
