Spacehey

Submission 2,733

About

Spacehey is a social network created by German developer Anton Röhm intended to resemble the layout and features of Myspace, though Spacehey has no affiliation with Myspace. The site has been praised for giving users the ability to fully customize their profile, as well as its lack of algorithms, "like" buttons and "news feed" features that are a staple of other social networks.

History

German coder Anton Röhm began developing Spacehey in 2020.^[1] He is too young to have used MySpace when it was popular, but upon learning about it, decided to pursue creating Spacehey. "I came to the conclusion that you can't find something like this nowadays, where everyone can be this creative," he told Vice.^[2] Spacehey launched on November 29th, 2020.^[3] Within a year, the site had over 200,000 registered users.^[1]

Features

Spacehey shares much of MySpace's features, including customizable profile pages, blogs, bulletins and instant messages.^[4] It lacks MySpace's "gallery" function due to the site's lack of financial resources and storage capacity. The site also promotes that it's "privacy-friendly," meaning users' information is not given to advertisers resulting in an algorithmic news feed. Instead, posts appear in chronological order on Spacehey. The site is financed by users purchasing "stickers" that show they are a supporter of Spacehey.^[5]

Online Presence

The site was praised by media outlets and users for its concept. In addition to the nostalgic praise for Spacehey's similarity to MySpace, social media users also praised that the site offered an alternative model to algorithmically driven social media sites. On November 11th, 2021, Twitter user WriteAsRae^[6] tweeted praise for the site's privacy policy, gaining over 150 retweets and 930 likes in roughly two days (shown below, left). On November 12th, the site was trending on Twitter.^[7] Many users expressed excitement about setting up a custom profile (example shown below, right).