As someone with extremely deep contempt for Silicon Valley, Big Tech monopolies, and modern social media culture, this brought a tear to my eye.It was so easy to make new friends online once upon a time.
The fascist uniformity of modern social platforms has left a generation creatively stifled and alienated from each other. I miss the ugly comet cursors, the crummy MIDI tunes, the bad HTML, the encouragement to make new friends, and the ability to reach people without paying thousands in garbage ads.
I miss dating online without bribing some shitty algorithm. It used to be that I could click "browse," find a cute girl's profile, say hi, and set up a date within a few days. Modern social media is cold and hostile. Stay in your friend group. Avoid strangers: They're all scary and bad. Don't trust anyone (except for us, the tech company. Give us all your data for free.)
The internet used to be bohemian, weird, creative, tacky, and friendly. It was my favorite place to be. Where did that joy go? What have we become in the last 8 years?
I'm absolutely blown away by the speed of this website. Facebook and Twitter are a bloated heavy mess in comparison.
I just registered for an account and I'm getting super nostalgic. Really well done!
Edit: here's my profile in case someone wants to add me :)
Good idea. I think there’s a lot of room for some kind of internet social network that gives you a space for a custom profile, chatting with friends about anything, no algorithms dictating what you see, no heavy handed moderation, etc. wish you success
Tom
Don’t forgot to have Tom be your default first friend.
Maybe weird feedback but the COVID-19 Pandemic section on the front page really kills both the retro vibe and the idea that this might be something unique rather than yet another way for me to consume standard news.
I've been beta testing SpaceHey since I saw An was letting some people in and I must say the nostalgia is strong. Love this site so much!
Sidenote: I was in a band in High School that uploaded all its music to MySpace in 2006, and our only backups were a few CDs we had made; so when MySpace lost all that [0], it was my first, most painful lesson about backing up important things multiple times.
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/myspace-lost-m...
Playing around with it made me realize just how much I miss those good old derpy days, and how many great times I had on myspace and then mostly forgot about. It made me a bit emotional even. Thank you!
I don't have that much time atm, but I can't wait to get into the CSS and whatnot <3
I just got an error message about too many people trying to create accounts. Keep it going! I'll buy ad space if you never sell to big media.
Many creative people got their first public attention on MySpace. Soundcloud never quite matched it. Facebook and Twitter are rat races.
A re-run of MySpace, at scale, would be a benefit to the world. I hope this takes off like a rocket (without losing its spirit.)
This is nice! And reminds me of this other very cool MySpace rebuild by artist/hacker Jankenpopp:
Super cool! Are you considering federation a la ActivityPub et al?
Just thinking of a way for you to really stunt with what MySpace could have been that Facebook or Twitter would never do.
Website looks very very good and loads very fast imo. Just usable without fancy bells. I like this design.
The rebuild doesn't appear to be using React or Angular. Keeping it true to 2007-style server-side rendering.
I really hope this takes off! A human curated/self exploring site is a dream. I miss the myspace days when you could search by location, genre, and sort the data in various ways. I discovered so much music on my own, it was always an exciting adventure.
Looking great so far. When MySpace was at its peak, I used to run one of those "style your profile" type websites that let you generate custom CSS and all those fun things. I should try and dig it out and see if it works on SpaceHey!
Just a small CSS tip for your header and footer menus -- instead of using ::before/::after pseudo elements in your anchors themselves, if you place the menu items in a list you can use them there so the vertical pipe isn't part of the links. For example the following HTML:
<ul class="menu">
<li><a href="#">Link 1</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Link 2</a></li>
</ul>
.menu {
list-style: none;
padding: 0;
text-align: center;
}
.menu li {
display: inline;
}
.menu li:not(:last-child)::after {
color: #000;
content: ' | ';
}
18 year old, cool man. Respect.
Could you make the login form’s email field have type=“email”? Helps on mobile.
When I saw the title, I assumed I would just like it for the heck of taking a look into the past. But in reality the nostalgia hit very effectively, I really started remembering very good and interesting times on that website I had when i was a teen. You've done a really good job of capturing its magic.
I really hope this takes off. MySpace was the Geocities for the next generation. Express yourself, join a community, find new cool stuff. Facebook was the death of creativity until it eventually revived on Tumblr (and to a certain extent YouTube?).
If I have one feature request, it's a dedicated music (or any kind of event, really) scene thing that lets local people curate events and share them in a central town square, and lets randos find those local events. It could drive a whole lot of people who're not plugged into a scene to find awesome local events without having to go through some other portal, like newspaper event calendars, zines, rando facebook groups, etc. I spent a ridiculous amount of time curating events for punk shows by trawling MySpace pages because there was no other way to do it.
Will this actually stay online? I will unironically use this.
Lost it at Mark Zuckerberg’s profile pic in /Browse.
Aaand here is why we can't have nice things:
> Someone is currently trying to register hundreds of accounts with fake email addresses per second. I'm trying to prevent that so in the meantime you can't sign up on http://SpaceHey.com - sorry.
I'm not sure if/when it changed on the site, but MySpace listed the time comments were made in the comment posters local timezone instead of the readers timezone. It was such a strange thing that I still remember it decades later.
Someone needs to do the same for YouTube ca. 2007
So this was what MySpace looked like. I've never seen it before. Thanks :)
Neat!
I’d sign up if there was an option to throw a few bucks your way and have absolutely guaranteed zero tracking, ads, or sharing/use of my data for anything other than what’s strictly necessary to run the site itself.
I want to join, but this carries over a lot of the same problems that modern social media has developed - primarily, insight into a heavy portion of my personal data and connections, without any assurance that it won't be monetized in an untoward fashion. It sucks, but it feels like Facebook et al.'s abuse of their position has ruined this kind of centralized social media platform forever. Promises aren't enough; it has to be built into the platform structure. So I'm wary.
Sidenote: boy, do pages load fast, though. No cruft, I love it.
Nice work, I made a lot of good friends through the music section of the old MySpace and have been working on something similar. Facebook, Bandcamp, Soundcloud just aren't the same.
Someone's soon going to recreate the facebook!
Is it just me or nobody realize that the likes of MySpace started the downfall of the original Internet before it became "social media"?
Nostalgia of a simple web page is fine (and this is a nice implementation no doubt), but why recreate something that leads to something that is predictable?
Instead, recreate usenet with better privacy and mobile adoption. Usenet is what they killed before the promise of the Internet could be realized.
MySpace had all the pieces in place to own the music download space, and somehow let iTunes eat their lunch.
I don't know how that happened, but I suspect the new owner was pulling profit out of it to support their other flailing divisions, rather than let them reinvest to finish their music platform.
They literally had all the pieces on the platform side, and it was without question the platform of choice for pretty much every independent musical artist.
Anyone have the inside story?
Darn, I'm user number 300-something, and my real first name is already taken as someone else's username.
This is really great you guys. Good job! It really makes me realize how much I miss the old internet.
Haha, I love the logo. Just a peg person saying “hey”. This takes me back for sure. I would ditch the footer disclaimer though unless you really are trying to recreate MySpace in its entirety, which is a legal grey area. I’m all on board for a MySpace-esque experience again.
I never clicked on a sign up button so quickly.
I did the vintage pose and everything https://spacehey.com/kristopolous
I just reached out to Tom Anderson of Myspace, let's see if he comes around.
How did you recreate the interface though? Most of it was behind the log-in screen which wasn't captured by archive services. Are you trying to scrap together old screenshots? Even with that, I feel like not all UI screens are represented.
Wait, where's Tom? Seriously though, with a little visual touch up this could become good.
You should definitely tell us how to donate to this effort. Bring back the old web!
Thank you so much for making this. I hated how sterile Facebook was when it finally took over.
Are these pages going to index in google? I used to find lots of "friends" by searching site:myspace.com female statename interestname
A convenient way to funnel people to my Black Cauldron geocities fan page.
Nice you can add a <style> tag to your profile!
Please consider making the default colors/fonts CSS variables in the :root so that they can be easily overridden for profile page styling.
Blinking text is spot on! It’s a symbol of 90s 2000s websites.
Boss is constantly making jokes about being up on the socials with his myspace account. Now he's going to have to put his money where his mouth is.
Please tell me it's written in Cold Fusion too
Great work! I wish we were in an alternate reality where websites were still blazing fast and KISS. Just like Wikipedia and Craigslist.
But... where is Tom? And will he be my fist friend?
Hi! I registered and tried to message you, but that feature is still being implemented :-)
Curious to see the progression from here on, great job!
despite the opinion of some others here i _loved_ the old 2008 facebook. it's so sad how it all turned out 12 years later.
> Error! You can only send one friend-request every two minutes. Please wait a minute and try again.
This is going to slow down adoption.
I'm curious, is password storage using 2007 techniques too? Or are things like that a little more up-to-date? :P
If you built a web app in ASP.NET 1.x it would actually look a lot like this without much modification.
JK Rowling really joined this? Lol
I like this better than facebook.
NextDNS is complaining about the domain and blocks it. Anyone else had this issue?
Retro is somehow always in. Things always seem to come back in some shape or form.
Oh, cool. I was wondering when a better replacement for Facebook would show up.
Disappointed I wasn't immediately befriended by a friendly face: Tom.
Groups are still in progress. Those were the best part.
Can someone build An's SpaceHey Editor to match?
Just took a look at the page source. Tables--Huzzah!
I can't get past the Captcha on Firefox mobile
Is it still vulnerable to the Samy Kamkar worm?
What's the connection to tibush.com?
How is this not copyright infringement?
I never used MySpace, but this looks cool! Good idea to build off the nostalgia. Just on first glance, I noticed you're using URLs like https://spacehey.com/profile?id=123 for accessing profiles. That seems like a bad idea, using increasing numbers for pages in general is not great, because it makes it easy to scrape for every user on the site. Why not switch to something like a UUID or random base64 code?
but most of all, samy is my hero
I sense a renaissance coming
Awesome - just made my first theme and brought back some memories. Feel free to add me and steal my theme from my about me box: https://spacehey.com/contra
How about using that funkwhale with this ? That would be cool. Right?
This is wholesome. I realized how much I miss those days. Signed up - https://spacehey.com/offgrid365
Beautiful. Nice and speedy. Works surprisingly well on my phone, too :)
Profile: https://spacehey.com/ryno
Cool. If anyone wants to connect - https://spacehey.com/profile?id=316
It doesn't appear Mark is happy
Pretty cool, check out my profile: https://spacehey.com/t0m
It's a shame about the name.
It might have succeeded!
Nice!! is this open source
Who the fuck cares
I bet you will get a job too. The same way that Hollywood is simply making remakes and people are accepting this as new.
A Nuclear bomb would be nice right about now. Covid was not enough humble pie
How do you get followers? At sign up there is a flurry of views but no friend requests.
This is sick. Great job. We are building a tool that enables people to build social networks. It's a platform play. as a co-founder, I really want to bring back some elements of myspace. We are focusing on solving the hardest engineering problems, such as notification, feed, moderation, analytics & ...
Check it out at www.tribe.so
And let me know if you wanna talk more on this or even join forces. For folks out there, we are hiring for any position.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
Totally loving this. Did you reverse engineer the layouts from screenshots? Please tell me somewhere there is a snippet of original HTML snarfed from archive.org :)
Finally you're totally missing a beat here -- MySpace lived and died by its community of indie bands. Ditch that dodgy mainstream iTunes Music wrapper and make the actual music function work again. You never know, you might strike a nostalgic retro chord within some niche of the indie community (and definitely that's where this thing should be shared!)