Thoughts on SpaceHey so far.

I don't think SpaceHey will go mainstream, but I do think it could get semi-popular. From browsing the forums, it seems like 9 months to a year ago, people were worried about the website being dead and not enough users joining. However, it surged to 400,000 users in December 2021, which is a good sign. If the website doesn't fizzle out within the next few months, it may continue to have some growth spurts this year. My prediction is that it will become a trend for a short while, with lots of people on TikTok and Twitter posting about it and encouraging their friends to join. A small core group of people, probably those interested in emo/scene/alternative culture and music, will stay on it and continue to use it, while the majority of people will only stay on for a few months before going back to Twitter. The web is not going to get any less centralized any time soon, and more and more people are going to look for alternatives, and that may or may not end up being SpaceHey. I am fine with it either way; I don't mind the community being small as long as it's active.

The website certainly doesn't seem dead to me; I've gotten around 7 friend requests from random people within a few hours of joining, and lots of profiles say people have been active within the past 24 hours. 2 new groups have been made since I joined, too, which really isn't bad for an alternative website that's only a year old. I have seen a lot of young people on here, which is a good thing because it means it's not only attracting people with MySpace nostalgia, and every time I revisit the "Browse New People" page, more accounts have joined. The forums are not too bad in terms of activity; forums just have a slower pace than modern social networks and there's nothing wrong with that, though I wish not every topic on the front pages was from multiple months ago. This is an area where I think SpaceHey needs to improve upon MySpace's original design. For example, being able to sort the forums by date, a more robust search engine, and being able to see how many pages long a topic is would be really helpful to encourage people to use them more. I think if they get some more developers and keep putting a lot of love in, it will continue to attract people looking for an alternative to Facebook and Twitter, even if it's slow-going.

I love the blog and bulletin feature. It's replaced something that I've missed very badly ever since the great migration off of Tumblr, which is actually getting to read about what's going on in your friends' lives and how they're really feeling. You can't say anything on Facebook because all your family members are on there, Twitter obviously has the word limit, and I don't have Insta or TikTok but they're both overrun with influencers from what I've seen. I like Discord a lot, but starting a conversation on there is hard; servers are either too small or way too big. I still like Tumblr and use it as my main social media. It's still very active, but it has a different atmosphere than it did in its heyday; a lot chiller and more "aesthetic", with a lot less actual blogging going on. People don't really customize their blogs too much anymore, it's more about posting memes, reblogging gifsets and art, and having meta-conversations about the Tumblr community itself. I like that experience, but I also want a traditional blog/forum website that's build for this kind of thing and encourages actual original posting.

Those are my thoughts so far! I have had a lot of fun browsing around instead of doing my Russian homework ;)