A MySpace clone site called SpaceHey crossed the million user mark last week.
Its founder, 22-year-old student Anton Röhm, started working on the website during the pandemic when he was just 18. Pandemic restrictions prevented Röhm from traveling the world as he originally wanted before starting university — so he turned to coding for fun.
“I thought hey, why not build something like MySpace back then, but just new and with the basic functions, creative freedom and also the problem solving that I see in social media today,” Röhm said in one. Conversation 2021 in Hamburg, Germany. “And that's how SpaceHey came about.”
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Röhm, who wouldn't have been old enough to sign up for MySpace when it first launched in 2003, wrote in a reflective post that he created the initial version of SpaceHey in about 3 weeks.
SpaceHey has the same look and feel as MySpace, with profile pages, blogs, and instant messaging. It differs from the original in that users can fully customize their profiles with HTML and CSS code, share posts on other platforms, and embed content such as YouTube videos.
Röhm opened the website in November 2020 as “MySpace from circa 2007 with a modern tech stack” and gained organic traction in Product hunting AND Hacker News. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian even made a profile in November 2020.
Finally got one of those SpaceHey profiles everyone has been talking about ??https://t.co/9d7TVWiTGy
— Alexis Ohanian ?? (@alexisohanian) November 30, 2020
Last month, the platform has passed one million users.
“No algorithm on SpaceHey, no likes, no feed,” Röhm said Fast Company in an interview Thursday. He added that he is trying to differentiate the platform from other social media like Facebook and X by not having “content that absorbs you all the time and demands your attention”.
Röhm used the anti-algorithm sentiment previously expressed by people like then-Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Dorsey stated in June that we are being “programmed” through detection algorithms and that the real debate was not about free speech, but about free will.
Röhm's app also joins a growing list of major social media alternatives. The anti-AI app Cara, for example, won more than half a million users within a week in June banning AI art. Part of the reason for its momentum is that Meta says it can use photos, art and posts across its platforms to train its AI; Cara was an anti-AI alternative on Instagram at an opportune time.