You also navigated solely from profile to profile. There was no feed.

Scroll to the bottom of a page and that was it. No more comments, show is over.

You could make your page what you wanted. You could browse and search it the way you wanted.

Modern platforms do things to you while pretending to do them for you.

God, I loved Hypnospace Outlaw. Back when the internet was unsearchable and everyone loaded a .mid file to autoplay music on their homepage, marquee-scrolling text, skulls on fire and under construction banners.

Hypnospace Outlaw, Angelfire, Geocities and Neocities.

I miss the cringe web.

MySpace did have the Top 8 feature, which was weird and toxic as hell. Rate your favorite friends and family members!

I didn't use MySpace, but I would imagine people saw others as people posting stuff on a community board, at that point. Instead of a detached voice inside their computer.

MySpace (and a lot of early social media) was about keeping up with what was going on in your friends lives, not screaming into the void and being drowned out by brands and influencers (like I am doing now).

It was the fully HTML customizable pages that did it for me.

I vaguely recall being disappointed at how limited Facebook was compared to Myspace. I forget the specifics, but it seemed like people posting their stories, art, and music went from normal on Myspace to a rarity on Facebook. Maybe there was a structural reason or maybe it was coincidence... so long ago, back before the world ended in 2012 but nobody noticed.

Aaand every human need into economic blackmail, let's not forget that.

Might have been the last time a business owner said, "That's enough money for me."

Hey but at least on my space you could put dick pics up there and get away with it. I mean allegedly of course.

i have stopped saying good bye to people when i’m leaving in favor of a jaunty ‘don’t forget to like and subscribe’

But also less people didn't used pseudonymous names. Like, are you crazy now? MaryKay@gmail.com and your actual name is Mary Kay, that's just asking for it. They should do their thing and use cool names like BDSMenthusiast2012@proton.com.

Idk, we shouldn’t act like MySpace didn’t start getting into doing that though. Everyone doing a L4L, or comment for comment, etc. it was always about ‘oh you want your numbers up? Let’s trade, like for like’.

MySpace was the shit, but we shouldn’t pretend it was perfect.

I will not make the Fediverse suffer the music I made in college like I did MySpace.

Not every emotion, mostly fear and anger.

That was the original plan for MySpace though.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eImN9tcqMr0

Back when everyone’s big business idea was get a bunch of users to build an audience with a free service, and then “turn on the ads” to start making money.

Things have definitely changed since then. /s

that is one problem among many including extreme right wing troll bot farms and AI generated content

and the profile customization made geocities aesthetic blush at times.

MySpace wasn't better than Facebook when Facebook first started. There's a reason everyone moved to Facebook, but once Facebook killed its competitors it proceeded to enshitify.

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things

Thats because the era MySpace was created in, and died in.

If myspace was created 10 years later, it'd be the same festering cesspit that facebook was.

There was nothing special about myspace other than the time it was created, before enshitification had really hit the internet.

There are people who play the music and people who listen to it....

I bet Zuckerberg is having as much fun with internet as a user... because obviously he does not let it ruin his journey

Facebook got popular when I was still a freshman in high school, probably earlier, because I was a stubborn late adopter. I think my first Facebook update was trying to convince people to go back to Myspace. 🥲 Even back then I thought it was sterile and boring.

Part of me wonders how many people liked how Facebook catered to the "lowest common denominator" and didn't allow for much else. I think of how Myspace allowed people to customize their profiles extensively with HTML. A common joke is how either Neopets or Myspace taught millennials the basics of web development through allowing custom HTML. I'm curious how many people on Myspace couldn't figure HTML out and were envious of those who understood it/could make their profiles "look cool." And viola! Here is Facebook! A social media platform where no one can make fancy customizations.

I know there's plenty of other reasons Facebook succeeded, like "the feed", which made it easy for people to stay up to date on everything going on with their friend group, which of course made it an excellent vector for the enshittification and propaganda generation observed later on.

We should go all the way back to Livejournal, it was the best.

I always thought that kind of social media was a recipe for bad times. Alas, most people don't care or think much, so here we are.

Word on the street, and I mean literally only the one word and one street, is that MySpace is coming back? And that it's marketing itself to a politically progressive user base ala Bluesky. I haven't been able to verify the veracity of this claim and go figure the one time I went to go look at MySpace, it was down at the time.

The original owners are saying they want to relaunch MySpace, but they will likely fill it with LLM slop and drivel and create profit-making algorithms while saying they are going to do otherwise.

If they don't make it a federated platform, it will inevitably enshitify.

And here we all are building back better on the Fediverse/Threadiverse!

I think this goes counter to the point diorworthy is making. The "technology" or knowledge or the market has change. WE changed too. So you can change the system and make it more open and democratic, but the fundamental forces acting on it have changed.

https://spacehey.com/ <- revisit the nightmare

Suddenly; Tila Tequila.

I remember mySpace and it kinda sucked. That's not to say things are better today, but it did suck.

MySpace sucked. Thats my hot take. I lived through it, I know how much it sucked. Hence why we all abandoned it ASAP. You know its all true.