We aren't cool - why Spacehey is weird

I really liked the idea of this website. I enjoyed making my page and finding cool mutuals and such. But it never really stuck with me. I'm scrolling through it now and I'm realising why everything here feels so...slightly forced?

It's because this just isn't cool.

This website only exists as a response to modern day social media. It has no innate purpose for being here minus being exactly like MySpace probably felt in 2007. Keyword probably, because as I discovered very very quickly, nobody on here is old enough to have used MySpace, and are all running on the assumption of what you think it was like. That's not a bad thing, and to avoid being hypocritical I'm not old enough to have used it either, but the key thing here is that ya'll are missing context. Sweet, sweet context.

Myspace was not, and let me be clear, NOT a site for making cool online friends in the manner that the majority of spacehey users want it to be. Your mutuals would be people you know in real life, because an 'online identity' as a concept didn't really take off until instagram. Instagram (and to an extent Tumblr) brought on the idea of having a 'life' online, which is hard to fathom for a generation of teenagers that grew up within this digital bubble. Myspace was before that 'bubble'. Before fandom culture as we know it, before online discourse as we know it, before cancel culture, before yumeshipping or whatever the fuck the kids are calling selfshipping nowadays - I digress. 

Fandoms back then happened at conventions. Not 80 dollar comicon like we have now, i'm talking a local hotel lobby in your area has 20 stalls 200 people and a dream. That is physical presence. You'd meet people and add them on Myspace after. Myspace wasn't the destination, like we treat Spacehey now. 

To put it as simply as possible I think this site is weird because ya'll are trying to put a square in the circle hole, so to speak.

We are treating this like an escape from the isolated, individualistic social media hellscape that is Tiktok. But Myspace wasn't created as an escape from Tiktok back in the 2000s. So Spacehey can't really be a myspace clone. They serve different purposes, and exist within different contextual factors. Myspace existed before every other major social media platform, these blogs were not designed to hold 2026 fandom wars! Hoe your fav anime wasn't available outside of bootleg japanese DVDS in 2006 there wasn't enough people to have discourse with!

That's why everything feels so performative, and a bit forced, in my opinion. You want this to be a fun community away from short form content and comment section bullshit, but the only way we know how to do that is by applying said comment section bullshit to a retro cool looking wesbite. I cant emphasise this enough, if you're thirteen and on here because you want friends, as someone who was once thirteen, this. site. is. exactly. the. damn. same. as. the.rest.

What you want is to be 16 in 2005, with real world third spaces and real world connections. You want a life that is primarily offline and to naturally meet cool people in real life to add on Myspace when you get home. You want Friends of friends that like the same stuff, not retroactivley or because it looks cool to do so, but because the internet was new and it was a new way of communicating with people. 

Myspace was a new way of communicating with people, that's it. We're acting like it's some cool counter-culture social media because all we know is that we don't like Tiktok. But that doesn't make this cooler. Everyone on here has discord, everyone on here probably has Insta. This site doesn't actually exist to 'revive the old internet' it exists because the old internet sounds a lot nicer than whatever the hell we have now. It is fundementally impossible to recreate something for the first time again. 

So when every third blog post you see here is about some proshipper controversy and some "why I'm leaving spacehey" please remember that you're just looking at reddit with html. It sucks that the internet is lonely. And I'm genuinley very happy for everyone that has managed to find cool online friends through this website. But the thing you really wanted to find here hasn't existed since 2006.