The Internet has become such a hostile place that there are people making drastic decisions: go back to MySpace

In a thread on Reddit’s r/Millenials subreddit, a user named Blue_Bi0hazard counted that had signed up for SpaceHeya curious MySpace clone, and I was happy about two things. The first, due to the personalization that this new social network offered. “I can’t stand today’s social media,” he explained. “There is hardly any personalization, everything is gray and simplified. Remember how MySpace or Tumblr was: there you really felt that your profile represented you.”

Second, because of how the algorithm has taken over everything: at SpaceHey, he explains, “your feed is chronological, rather than what Facebook or Twitter think you should see, plus the damn ads.”

These criticisms are not new, and for some time they have caused a unique Internet revolution. Small communities are returning to using clones of myspace as SpaceHeyor of GeoCitiesas NeoCitiesand although their scope is limited, they are the symptom of something very worrying.

Beyond nostalgia

Behind these seemingly nostalgic gestures, something deeper is drawn. Not only the desire to return to a retro design, but to raise a kind of digital demand. A “I want to have my corner again” in a sea of ​​feeds that no longer belong to us and over which we have no control.

The return to MySpace, or rather, to something that evokes it—like SpaceHey—is actually a critical and rebellious act. It is a gesture that says “I am tired of the current Internet turning me into a consumer rather than a user, that everything I do is subject to the algorithm, the subscription and the ads.” And that’s when that return to those rehashes of the past takes on that other meaning. That of a more or less silent protest.

Twenty-five years ago, opening the browser was like doing digital zapping and extremely garish. Amateur blogs were interspersed with local forums, profiles with flashing GIFs, view counters (view counters!), and pages that didn’t open on their own, but also had music on autoplay.

It was the internet of the 2000s. GeoCities, LiveJournal, ICQ, Friendster, Blogger and MySpace conquered users and they did so with hardly any algorithms. Was a more hippie internetmessy and unpredictable but full of personality. The profiles were their own spaces, not showcases optimized for clicking.

Now we remember that time fondly and smile when we realize that the Internet was full of defects. Loading times were much longer, handling HTML was almost a craft, and mixtures of fonts and designs often resulted in strident and garish web pages.

However, they also had virtues. They let you make mistakes without charging you for it. They let you be weird without having to ask permission. Nobody (or almost nobody) had to sell anything, and nobody yet knew that they would end up selling you (or your data). It was the internet as a workshop, not as a gallery or showcase.

but then standardization arrived. With Facebook, YouTube, Google or later Instagram and TikTok, we were promised order, efficiency and global connection. The Internet went from being its own territory to a service platform in which profiles became uniform, timelines identical, and rules impersonal.

The “enshittification” of the internet

This is how we have reached the digital fatigue that many experience today. 20 tabs are opened and the same ads, the same formats and the same giants appear. The Internet is no longer so much a “site” as a “medium” in which we only consume, and what we do more than explore and navigate is end up being victims of doomscrolling.

This is where the concept comes into play. “enshittification” (“shitification”, in a loose translation) coined by writer Cory Doctorow. This neologism, as recently explained in an interview with Voxdescribes the drift of many online platforms, although it is applicable to all types of companies:

“At first they are great for the end users. Then they find ways to retain those users (switching costs, network effects, contracts, DRM) and once the users are trapped, the company makes the product worse to get more value. They then use that surplus to attract business customers (advertisers, sellers, creators), they trap them and start making the product worse for the business side as well. In the end, everyone gets trapped and the platform becomes a pile of garbage. You can see this in places so like Google, Facebook, Uber and Amazon.

In other words: what started out promising becomes mediocre, predictable and profit-oriented, not user-oriented. Shitification clearly manifests itself on today’s internet in various ways. It does this with mandatory subscriptions, with algorithms that decide what you see, with constant advertisements and with data that no longer seems to be yours, but rather turns you into simple merchandise. Before, you opened a blog to publish what you wanted. Now the objective seems to be to gain clicks or provoke engagement.

All of this has caused users to become target audiences, consumers and even simple data. It seems that there is no more time to browseand we only have it to consume what the algorithms offer us. On Reddit someone asked if others were nostalgic for the internet of the 2000s and the comments were conclusive. The first of them, in fact, made it clear: “nothing seems genuine anymore.”

Reviving MySpace

That’s where platforms like SpaceHey, which appeared in 2020 and it is totally inspired by MySpace. Its creator, a young German named Anton Röhm and nicknamed “An” on the platform, is in fact the contact that by default is added to your “friends” on the platform, as on MySpace you added that of its creator, Tom Anderson.

Like a good clone, the similarities between SpaceHey and MySpace go much further. In SpaceHey, personalization shines, and that aesthetic of early 2000 It is evident in strident and shocking designs. The social network — which has around two million users — does not intend to compete with Facebook or Instagram, but it allows its users to recover part of that feeling of freedom and control that they had with MySpace.

Even the users themselves recognize that the experience is striking and enjoy it… for a while. After those first moments of nostalgic reunion, users seem to end up using it sporadically or abandoning it completely the platform. It’s not strange: I wanted to try the experience myself and I found a very young community —teenagers aged 13-15, something that others have confirmed— that they barely publish. And without content, it seems difficult for users to return.

But it’s not just SpaceHey. There are other “islands” of the Internet that seem to harbor that desire to return to that old Internet. If SpaceHey is a clone of MySpace, Neocities It is from the mythical GeoCities. Along the same lines is Tilde.clubwhich has been offering a proposal for 10 years aimed at users who want to personalize their small web corners and learn along the way. Not many They seem to go beyond registration and putting some bannerit seems, although others yes they benefit of the experience.

Even so, in these sites one has that other place in which to experiment with editing HTML, playing automatic music and in general avoiding the traditional algorithm. You regain the authorship of your web page a little more, you expose yourself to errors and owns the do-it-yourselffor better and for worse. Autonomy becomes a value, and in an internet dominated by large platforms, the proposal is attractive.

There are also other notable elements on these platforms. Here the discovery by accident, almost completely random, shines more than ever. At SpaceHey they actually encourage this digital serendipity, because in their navigation section (“Browse”) there is a small link in the “Active Users” section titled “(random)”.

If you click on it, it will take you to the SpaceHey page of one of its users completely randomly. Going to that resource is attractive, but what you will surely achieve is bring you more than one surprisebecause the designs in SpaceHey do not leave anyone indifferent… especially when we have become accustomed to everything being more or less elegant, clear and, in a certain sense, grey.

These sites are designed to be lost on the web, so that not everything is news or a viral topic that everyone is sharing. In fact, it is normal that you come across antiviral things.

That said, with these platforms it is not exactly about reviving that internet of the early 2000s. What they are really looking for is imagining another digital reality. One less corporate, less monitored, more yours.

Perhaps the MySpace we long for is not a website, but a sensation. That of opening the browser without too many expectations, that of “surfing” out of curiosity, making mistakes without it being a problem. If some are finding something like this again—even if it’s a clone—perhaps it’s a sign that when someone tries to take away the good things about the internet, we try to claim it.

In Xataka | All the times that throughout the 20th century we imagined ourselves on the Internet