I'm actually really fucking loving Spacehey (a webmaster's second impression of Spacehey)

Now that it's been a month since I started using this site, I thought I might revisit my first blog entry, "A webmaster's first impression of Spacehey".

This site is better than I had expected. The thing is, I expected it to be quite dead. Maybe I'm just used to Tumblr, where unless you make fandom posts, noone is going to see your stuff. Or maybe I'm used to having an independent site, where receiving comments is extremely rare. So it was a pleasant surprise that people actually *care* about my stuff over here. And it's not really a matter of how many people see a post per se, because reach is relatively small on this site. It's just that people feel more compelled to interact with each other on here. I think it's because, unlike most modern social media, you actually feel like you're interacting with a user that you're slowly getting to know. When I comment on someone's post on modern social media, I'm always under the impression that me and that user will never interact again, or that if we do, they're not going to remember about me. But it's different here. I check my "friends"(as in friended users, not as in people I actually know well enough to consider friends) blog posts and bulletins regularly. And as I've seen their posts several times already, and I remember about them, I feel compelled to leave them a comment. I wouldn't go as far as to call it affection, but I'm definitely fond of some people on here. In the way you'd be fond of people you see daily but don't really have a relationship with. And that feels better than modern social media.

There are some cons about this site, obviously. The main one being that it might be just like MySpace a bit too much. And with that I mean that it might not be profitable enough to stay up, and that would be a real bummer. Well that actually applies to *all* online platforms, even the well established ones like mainstream social media. Just look at what happened to Geocities. I think the slogan "what you post on the internet stays on it forever" actually did irreparable damage to common understanding of how the internet works. In truth, you don't really "own" your social media profiles, meaning that if that platform goes down for whatever reason, you're going to loose everything you "saved" on it. Of course, you can always save a snapshot of your page with the Wayback Mahcine, but as anything else, the Internet Archive (which runs the Wayback Machine) isn't immune to going offline sooner or later either.

And that's all the thoughts I have on the site for now. It has been lovely, and I've been recommending it to all of my irl friends. Have I managed to convince any of them to try it? No. But I still have hope.