SpaceHey Will Not Save Us

Look, I love SpaceHey. I'm here customizing my profile with glitter text like it's 2006. The vibes are immaculate. But we gotta be real about what this actually is.

SpaceHey isn't saving us from anything. It's a museum. We're all just cosplaying our teenage years, pretending the old internet was somehow pure and good. Except it wasn't—we just forgot about the viruses, the harassment, and the fact that way fewer people even had access.

The old internet felt better because we were younger, there were less people online, and tech companies hadn't figured out how to weaponize our attention yet. That's it. It wasn't the custom CSS.

Here's the thing everyone's avoiding: the problem with modern social media isn't the aesthetic. It's surveillance capitalism, algorithmic manipulation, and corporate monopolies. SpaceHey has custom backgrounds but it's still centralized, still needs to make money somehow, and still vulnerable to the exact same forces that destroyed MySpace.

Every hour we spend recreating 2006 is an hour we're not building actual alternatives. The fediverse exists. Decentralized protocols exist. Co-ops exist. But they're not giving us that nostalgia hit, so we're LARPing instead of organizing.

I'm keeping my SpaceHey account. It's fun. But I'm not pretending it's resistance. It's escapism. A nice aesthetic break. Not a solution.

The internet we need doesn't exist in the past. It hasn't been built yet. And recreating MySpace won't build it.