Want to bring your MySpace page back in 2021? Try out this new site

Before TikTok, there was Vine. Before Vine, there was Instagram. Before Instagram, there was Facebook. Before Facebook, there was MySpace. 

Anyone in their late twenties & early thirties remembers the early days of social media, when your page wasn’t merely an easy way for your assigned FBI agent to find you, but a way to present yourself to the world just as you wanted to. 

Ahh yes, MySpace brings to mind the days when our best friend Tom would allow our social media profiles to freeze up desktops across the dial-up information superhighway with elaborate skins, background music, and stylized cursors any visitor would have to put up with to see our page. 

That was then

These days, social media is way different – it’s the corporations’ world, and we’re just living in it. Now, all users of Facebook, Instagram, and the rest of the social media giants need to follow the rules of their platforms, which allow minimal customization, and compared to MySpace, are just plain boring. 

If our teenage selves could see our profiles now, we’d say: “where’s the love?” 

For years, the plethora of options giving us ways to wear our personalities on our digital sleeve have been ripped from our hands since MySpace went the way of the pet rock, and we’ve been forced into the sterile prisons of impersonal profiles on Facebook & Instagram. However, thanks to one Zoomer, you may be able to fire up your MySpace page once again.

This is now

Vice reported in February of a new website called SpaceHey, one meant solely to replicate the MySpace experience, and skyrocket our old pal Tom back to relevance once again. 

Despite the nostalgia for MySpace being driven almost solely by the millennials who made the site their lives, the new MySpace replica was coded entirely by an eighteen-year-old Gen Z’er.

SpaceHey

The teen behind SpaceHey, An from Germany, recognizes they were only a few years old when the MySpace page ruled social media, but explains they heard so much about the defunct platform through older friends online. 

This type of just-missed nostalgia is nothing new; millennials remember fawning for the days of Tab & leg warmers with shows like I Love the 80s in the early 2000s, and it seems like every generation finds a way to look at the last ten to twenty years through rose-colored glasses.

An spent time over the last year, amid restrictions put in place by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, digging up screenshots, videos, and any archived MySpace page they could find to make SpaceHey as accurate to the original as possible. Apparently, An has pulled off a near-perfect replica of MySpace.

Just like MySpace

SpaceHey looks just like the MySpace of yore, and the new site features all the bells & whistles of the days when updating your Top 8 was a socially risky, but entirely necessary affair. 

The site features blogs, old IM functions, and the ability to entirely customize your page using HTML. But are millennials really dying to get back to putting up a theme song for their daily mood change and updating their page with a new fresh skin each week? Of course, they are.

Since SpaceHey launched in November of 2020, close to 55,000 users have joined as of February 2021. 

SpaceHey users who talked to Vice say the MySpace replica brings them back to the days when social media allowed you to chat with like-minded strangers in an escape from the waking world, unlike today’s social media which is growing more & more to be an extension of our IRL life, as actions made online can, of course, yield massive consequences.

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SpaceHey seems to be growing with users by the day, and we can only wonder if it’ll explode to the levels of Facebook fame, or (as many users hope) SpaceHey will remain an alternative to the giants of social media, and stay a place where the outcasts can be themselves.