So, SpaceHey?

As my About Me says, I'm a millennial refugee from the hellscape of social media. I never really appreciated MySpace for what it was, the first time around. It was just some weird blogging service that had music on it, and it was full of emo kids. These days I think MySpace, and thus SpaceHey, is exactly what we need. It has the flair of the personal website, with our very flexible layouts. It has the connectivity of bulletin boards. It doesn't force feed you content designed to enrage you for clicks.

See, in the 2000s, I didn't really see the point in MySpace. I had a whole bunch of vBulletin and phpbb forums I was on for various interests. I had MSN Messenger for chatting with people I wanted to stay in touch with. We didn't blog every facet of our lives, but if we wanted to share something we had our own websites, or we'd have a Geocities page or something. I miss some aspects of it, but things are better now in a lot of ways. Fan wikis didn't exist, so if you wanted to find something out that wasn't notable enough for your copy of Encarta, you'd connect to the internet, find some dubious Geocities or Angelfire page with an obnoxious auto-playing midi, and "under construction" gifs flashing at the top and the bottom of the page. The site would have everything from South Park episode guides to confident repetition of the myth that Mew was under the truck near the SS Anne. It was a different time. I miss it, but I don't want to go back.

MySpace was kind of something new, when it came along, and a lot of us didn't really know what to do with it. It was a huge boon for indie bands, and an early refuge for a lot of people, people of varied sexualities and gender identities (certainly not safe from abuse, but you could find others like you), or various neurodivergencies we didn't really recognise back then...

I really hope SpaceHey gets some broader use. I want it to succeed, whatever success means for social media, today.