A MySpace clone web site known as SpaceHey handed the million-user mark final week.
Its founder, 22-year-old scholar Anton Röhm, started engaged on the web site throughout the pandemic when he was simply 18 years previous. The pandemic’s restrictions stored Röhm from touring the world like he initially wished to earlier than beginning college — so he turned to coding for enjoyable.
“I assumed hey, why do not I construct one thing like MySpace again then, however simply new and with the essential features, the artistic freedom, and moreover fixing the issues that I see on social media these days,” Röhm mentioned in a 2021 discuss in Hamburg, Germany. “And that is how SpaceHey happened.”
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Röhm, who would not have been sufficiently old to enroll in MySpace when it first launched in 2003, wrote in a reflective put up that he created the preliminary model of SpaceHey in about 3 weeks.
SpaceHey has the identical appear and feel as MySpace, with profile pages, blogs, and instantaneous messaging. It differs from the unique in that customers can totally customise their profiles with HTML and CSS code, share posts on different platforms, and embed content material like YouTube movies.
Röhm launched the web site in November 2020 as “MySpace from round 2007 with a contemporary tech stack” and it organically gained traction on Product Hunt and Hacker Information. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian even made a profile in November 2020.
Lastly received a type of SpaceHey profiles everybody has been speaking about ??https://t.co/9d7TVWiTGy
— Alexis Ohanian ?? (@alexisohanian) November 30, 2020
Final month, the platform surpassed a million customers.
“There is no algorithm on SpaceHey, no likes, no feed,” Röhm instructed Quick Firm in a Thursday interview. He added that he is making an attempt to distinguish the platform from different social media like Fb and X by not having “content material sucking you in on a regular basis and demanding your consideration.”
Röhm tapped into anti-algorithm sentiment beforehand voiced by the likes of then-Twitter, now-X founder Jack Dorsey. Dorsey acknowledged in June that “we’re being programmed” by discovery algorithms and that the actual debate was not about free speech however free will.
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Röhm’s app additionally joins a rising listing of mainstream social media options. The anti-AI app Cara, for instance, gained greater than half one million customers inside every week in June by banning AI artwork. A part of the rationale for its momentum is Meta saying that it might use photographs, artwork, and posts throughout its platforms to coach its AI; Cara was an anti-AI Instagram different at an opportune time.