Hullo strangers!

I've been waiting forever for something like this to come back. I should have figured somebody would want to make that happen by this point. So kudos and greetings to the spacehey team and user community!

My name's Chris. I'm a 30 year old tech professional who loves singing, playing bass, writing movie scripts, and teaching/learning about cool things! I have an amazing partner and adorable dog, a spooky cool band called Begin at Zero, and an all around unique and supportive group of family and friends. I'm producing an animated webseries too, a supernatural thriller called Classroom Ritual - we put out the first episode this past month and are working on the next one!

I remember deleting my Myspace account the day I turned 18. That was the summer between finishing high school and starting college. The changes in priorities from my teens to my twenties were shaped in great part by the things the internet was being used to communicate.

I made a Facebook status around that time, criticizing the platform I was on for "becoming more about pages than people". Ironically, when my band started and we had a page with music to share and tickets to sell, using FB to self-promote became an addiction that seeped into basically every other facet of my online life and much of my offline life. How many likes, how much engagement, whether or not people really cared -- that stuff was constantly on my mind.

I'm obviously not the only one who dealt with this. To be fair, playing this game is more or less a necessity for creatives seeking an audience, especially for those who depend on their art for an income. But this does make me think of another irony:

Myspace was often criticized for being a platform of gross narcissism. The reason? We had pages that talked about who we were and the things we enjoyed. We made diaries about what we were dealing with in life and ideas we cared about. We had a way of making ourselves look important with basically no effort.

Contrast that with the impersonal venom being spewed as Twitter crashes and burns. The passive cruelty you see in TikTok comments. The eagerness to completely dehumanize strangers on Facebook. Many of us have been trying to prove to ourselves that we're important at all, doing so by attempting to get noticed without being disliked.

So, my hope for spacehey and the new generation of social media websites is that we tell the world more about who we are, what we find neat, and why we're awesome! After all, what's a better way to find awesomeness you didn't know was there? :)