Have you heard? The old Myspace is back. Kind of.
Completely coded by an 18-year-old from Germany named An, Spacehey it is close to the carbon copy of the OG social network’s design in the early 2000s. According to vice, the new network, which looks exactly like the old network, was launched last November and so far has attracted around 55,000 users worldwide.
An told Vice said he wants to create a social network better privacy area and allowed users to be more creative.
‘Thanks to older friends and the internet, I heard a lot about it [Myspace]. “I have come to the conclusion that you can not find such a thing these days,” said An.
He spent his free time researching quarantined internet archives to make Spacehey look as authentic as possible for the classic version of Myspace.
And he nailed it.
Myspace has been reloaded before, but never with the look and feel of the original. That’s what made it attractive, and Spacehey recreates it almost perfectly.
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Spacehey offers some features that the original Myspace lacks, such as the option to add links to your other social media profiles on Twitter and other platforms that did not yet exist at the time. You can include content from Spotify and YouTube, which did not exist at the time. There is even a section with pre-made, user-created layouts if you do not feel like coding everything from scratch – though it’s half the fun of having a Myspace, er, Spacehey.
But all the core elements of classic Myspace are there. Friend space. Blogs. Interests. Comments. Even the small “online now” label. If you feel a little inspired, Spacehey is a user corentin has a running list of other users who have completely decorated their profiles with fun fonts, bright neon colors and animations that are almost too nostalgic to handle.
However, An says Spacehey is more than just a Myspace clone. He is very active on the platform, and responds directly to complaints from users and is not afraid to drop the hammer on someone who spreads hate speech and harassment on the network. Not only is this a welcome change in the social media landscape, but it is also a direct contrast to the approach that Facebook and Twitter have used over the years with misinformation and hate groups.
Myspace taught my high school itself a lot of things. It taught me how to use HTML, and that overloading your page with flashy text and automated music made for a bad user experience. It taught me how to deal with creepers that slip into my DMs. But most of all, it was a much-needed refuge from over-the-top parents who liked to sniff through my text messages and listen to my phone calls when I just wanted privacy. I’ve been looking for a Facebook alternative for years now, 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 need to use your browser. But I like it. I miss the early days of cell phones not being able to connect to the internet, which made it so easy to turn off social involvement for days, even weeks in a row. Spacehey may end up being a niche social media platform for a very specific user (for example, an older millennium), but that’s OK.
My Spacehey page needs a lot of work. But I went through my old Photobucket account very well, where I stored all the menus and background photos I made for my old Myspace. It’s such a unique time capsule of my younger self’s interests: my obsession with CSI, Zach Braff in Garden state (my adult self no longer understands it), small icons I made for some of my favorite albums of Icon of Coil, A Perfect Circle, and Don Hertzfeldt’s short film Reject. I’m still in some ways like my teenager myself, but of course have grown tremendously since then.
It may not soar to TikTok popularity heights, but Spacehey is a setback to the fact that it was fun and creative to form a social media profile. And I have a shooting.