SpaceHey: A MySpace Renaissance With 600,000 Users
Made by an 18-year-old coder from Germany, the site’s quiet comeback is more than just 00’s sleaze — it’s a stand against modern social media.
Deepshika Pasupunuri
One Thursday, as Trump continued to lash out over the 2020 polls on Twitter, 18-year-old Anton Röhm took to the app, tweeting to a few hundred followers that his new site — spacehey.com — was live.
Taken up as a quarantine project, Anton’s idea was to reboot MySpace from around 2007, when old-school blogs, gaudy profiles, and Top 8’s swept the online social sphere. Previous attempts were made to revive MySpace, but glitches, ongoing data issues, and, most significantly, a failed server migration project, which lost every single piece of content uploaded before 2016, reduced the once-thriving website to a digital necropolis.
Angel, a 21-year-old from Kentucky, hoped to find some life left on the site when she got her own computer a few years ago. Realising MySpace wasn’t what it used to be, she joined its clone, SpaceHey. Now, she’s one of the website’s 600,000 users, quietly reliving the days of the Old Internet.
“Around 2007-2008, it was a common occasion to get kicked out of my bestie's computer room because her older sister was ready to check MySpace,” Angel recalls. “We weren't allowed to have one of course.”
Shezer Sherrin, a 23-year-old from Swindon, UK, also has similar memories. “I had mates with less strict parents and older brothers who would show us all these bands, games, videos.”
Younger users like Shezer and Angel, who weren’t old enough to fully explore MySpace, make up a bulk of SpaceHey’s pan-generation base. In a way, it’s a clean slate too. “As Gen Z are adults, we wanna explore that now as we have full independence,” Shezer explains.
Since its launch in 2020, SpaceHey has also gone a step further and branded itself on two pillars: privacy and personalised pages. The latter was once MySpace’s biggest sensation, letting users style their pages through simple HTML and CSS. Anton has even said he spent hours raking through old internet archives, screen grabs, and video footage to make SpaceHey as close to the original as possible. And he smashed it.
Macey can vouch for it, having been an active MySpace user back in her 30s. Although she can’t access her old MySpace page now, she says that “it looked very much like any SpaceHey account.”
Prior to the 2000s, most internet traffic came from chat rooms and message boards. “But MySpace was like a revolution at the time,” recalls Macey. “Right when MySpace was at its zenith, I was working my side gig as a musician, and it made it so much easier to find places to play, promote local gigs, and really reach folks.” Even after the economic collapse, she recalls how MySpace offered a great escape for folks like her who didn’t have high investments of 401ks to worry about. “People couldn’t afford to go on lavish vacations or go out to expensive restaurants, but they could afford to go out to the local bar for a night away and cheap drinks. It was a great time to be a musician.”
For thousands of burgeoning musicians like her, MySpace’s impact was immense. Not only did it transform the industry, but it also gave artists the ability to share their music directly, announce upcoming live shows, and interact with listeners. From grime artists to mall goths, MySpace was a digital meeting ground where users could find, talk to, and connect with people they otherwise couldn’t reach.
As the decade drew to an end, MySpace was still the biggest website in terms of traffic. But legal issues, buggy user experiences, and poor management, coupled with the rise of Facebook, drove the website to the ground. Meanwhile, social networking also experienced seismic shifts. With newer content-sharing features, meaningful interactions slowly began taking a backseat. In its place came modern social media, built on quick likes, recommendations, and algorithms.
Macey witnessed this decline herself. But SpaceHey, she says, “like the MySpace days, requires effort. Whether that’s making friends, reading blogs and bulletins, refreshing the page, or responding to things, it forces you to be more engaged if you’re going to get anywhere.”
Kelly Chaos, an ex-scene queen, also mourns the Old Internet. In the 2000s, Kelly was huge on MySpace, stacking up 800,000 friends before her page was hacked. So when she heard of SpaceHey, she immediately signed up. Although she doesn’t actively use SpaceHey anymore, Kelly recalls," It was fun to have that nostalgia back in my life. I donated money and everything because I want to see the site last.”
Like Macey, Kelly explains, “MySpace was amazing because it forced you to go out of your way and make meaningful connections with people. I miss that. I think social media died when MySpace died.”
Today, endless content streams, targeted ads, and metaverse fantasies have brought social media to a critical juncture. Add to that Meta’s plans to lay off 10,000 workers and Musk’s recent controversial shift to paid subscriptions, and the end of social media has never felt nearer.
“If Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter start forcing users to verify accounts and charging monthly fees, they might spark another exodus,” warns illustrator John Chalos.
John’s online experience began at university Vax Labs in 1994, where he used IRC and ICQ to communicate with friends. Recently though, having grown frustrated with his Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds, John began the search for a new social media platform. That’s when he found SpaceHey.
He hasn’t invested a lot of time into the site in case it ever ends up in litigation. “But it's fun to play with sometimes,” John admits, “It's nostalgic. It's something to point people toward when they ask what apps were like before they were jam-packed with ads, promoted content, recommendations and unwanted features.”
Daisy, a 15-year-old SpaceHey user from England, also feels this way. She was a toddler during MySpace’s heyday. But after seeing YouTube comments about how much people missed MySpace, she decided to try the site out. “SpaceHey doesn’t seem to have any sort of algorithm,” Daisy explains, “so I don’t just see things that may be something that I like or what is suggested to me. I instead see so many different people that have a variety of interests.”
Shezer also agrees, pointing out, “When you're running ads of news stories designed to make people call for your human rights to be diminished, in my case, trans, workers, and disabled rights, using social media becomes very uncomfortable.”
For users like them, SpaceHey is more than pure nostalgia. It’s a welcome refuge. And Anton is committed to keeping his website privacy-friendly, collecting only that data which is really needed, responding to each user personally, and taking an active stance on hate speech.
Now, SpaceHey officially has 600,000 users. The site isn’t quite in the billions game as Tiktok and Facebook — and maybe it’ll never be. But as John argues:
“SpaceHey is symbolic. It symbolises a return to the type of app users actually want. An app where the user is in control. An app that stays out of the way well enough that users can develop a meaningful community.”
Following Twitter’s footsteps, Meta announced Meta Verified, a new monthly subscription bundle costing up to $14.99. YouTube TV plans to make monthly subscriptions 114% more expensive than when it launched six years ago. Snapchat and LinkedIn both have their own paid subscription packages.
“It’s too much,” John admits. “We shouldn't stand for it. It's time for a more ethical and user-friendly app to take over, an app like SpaceHey.”
Deepshika is an MLitt: Modernities graduate, working as an independent writer. On weekends, she reads Kakfa or watches seriously bad reality TV. Occasionally, she’ll review both on Instagram.
