welcome! been on here for a little while and what I've noticed is the following:

general:

this style of social media is more old school, so expect less dopamine and information overload. you have to put effort into finding the things you like. to me, that's part of the draw. I like being able to find cool conversations and discover on my own without being fed certain things. folks on TikTok talk about building their FYP brick-by-brick...they don't know the half of it over here lmao

profiles:

profiles are really fun to work on! there's a lot of coding help you can find on here through forums if you're curious about how to do things. it's one of the few spaces that you can have lil customized html and css layouts beyond Tumblr and it was my original draw as someone who was tired of the boring landing pages of different social media sites.

back on the OG MySpace, it was more normalized to post on other people's walls and comment, but both due to the smaller size of this platform as it stands and to lurking more common, I think people don't reach out and comment on your page as often as one used to. I try to say hello to the people I friend as a courtesy, but I don't think that's necessarily a given! 

forums and groups:

you've already found this one, which is good~ I think the groups help organize posts to a specific audience and topic vs. the bigger ones. I kinda think they may want to consolidate this at some point, but I'm also down with the fact that the dev team seems to be pretty hands off. 

as far as forums go, ymmv - lot of teens on here along with adults. there's not really any kind of moderation that I'm seeing on here, but I haven't seen anyone be specifically rude; just mainly wrong about things without fact-checking if that makes sense?

blogging:

this has been really enjoyable for me! didn't realize how having a simple text editor on here makes writing easier. I dig the simplicity and the rich text editor. tempted to try some weird stuff with the in-line css, but I'm also concerned about breaking this thing like I've done a few times lofl

messages:

honestly have not used this a ton, mainly because the notification system I have for SpaceHey is pretty lax in contrast to the 50 notifs I get from Discord. did that on purpose, but yeah, I haven't really enjoyed using it too much. kinda leads into my next bullet!

users: 

the userbase is interesting. generally, there are two categories:

- people who used to use MySpace back in the day and want to rekindle the magic, and

- people who were either too young or missed out on MySpace altogether, but are disappointed that it's...well, MySpace.

the og scenesters:

the first group is sad about this platform not being as active as it was in its height, when a) the platform is up-and-coming, and it's going to take a minute to get people here, and b) the contrast between current social media is why you even came here to begin with. 

the site's run on donations and it's free. it's gotten as big as it has by word of mouth, not by advertising. if you want to have a community, you have to do the work and tell people about it. you also have to make the people on here feel welcome by interacting with them and operating on the site. 

and hell, if you want things to run better, donate to SpaceHey!!! 

the new kids on the block:

the second group is ignorant (not their fault) to what OG social media was. they're here because they're not happy with the many issues with new social media, thinking this is an antidote to that. 

social media built on the small web (i.e. non-corporate web) was not built to make money. [MySpace tried to make money off of its platform later on and sank as a result; Facebook and YouTube changed and evolved to be a platform to make money on.] 

it was built to provide people the opportunity to connect online without having to go to multiple locations and put them in one place. the optimization we currently see for TikTok, Instagram, whatever, is all from a place of trying to sell things to its userbase. 

these two are not so different

all of us are spoiled from new social media because it is driven by attention, meaning they built it that way so you would have a hard time leaving because if you left, they wouldn't be able to sell you things. 

so, it's an attitude adjustment. 

in summary, spacehey is not:

- Discord - you're not going to get lightning-fast responses for anything. it's not a messaging system. remember: a site that has the incentive to keep you on it all the time does not have your best intentions in mind.

- MySpace - nothing is going to replace MySpace, even a clone. we're making something different here, yo! 

- a substitution for community in your day-to-day! this space is not going to help you escape your life because it just isn't cohesive enough to have the immersion of those spaces. 

spacehey is, however:

- a cool place to discover ways to disconnect from the dark web

- something different than other platforms that are currently active right now, full of people who have the shared desire to reclaim the web for themselves

- whatever we decide to make it! if you're only on here to just do profile customizations and dip for a few weeks, that's okay! if we want to use this boy as as means to organize etc, we can do that. 

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thanks for coming on! I'm curious to know if there's anything else I've missed here, but that's the long and short of it.