A MySpace clone site called SpaceHey hit the one million user mark last week.
Its founder, 22-year-old student Anton Röhm, started working on the website during the violence when he was only 18 years old. The restrictions of the pandemic kept Röhm from traveling the world as he wanted to do before starting university – so he turned to coding for fun.
“I thought, why not build something like MySpace back then, but just new and with basic functions, creative freedom, and problem solving that I see in social media today,” Röhm said in a 2021 speech. Hamburg, Germany. “And that’s how SpaceHey happened.”
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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 post showing that he created the first 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 customize their profiles with HTML and CSS code, share posts on other platforms, and embed content such as YouTube videos.
Röhm launched the website in November 2020 as “MySpace from 2007 with a modern technology stack” and gained traction on Product Hunt and Hacker News. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian even made a profile in November 2020.
Finally got one of those SpaceHey profiles everyone was talking about ??https://t.co/9d7TVWiTGy
– Alexis Ohanian ?? (@alexisohanian) November 30, 2020
Last month, the platform surpassed one million users.
“There is no algorithm on SpaceHey, no likes, no feeds,” Röhm told Fast Company in an interview Thursday. He added that he is trying to differentiate the platform from other social networks like Facebook and X by not having “content that constantly sucks you in and wants your attention.”
Röhm tapped into the anti-algorithm sentiment expressed by the likes of then-Twitter, now X founder Jack Dorsey. Dorsey said in June that we are being “edited” by algorithms and that the real issue was not about freedom of speech but freedom of choice.
Related: Jack Dorsey Says Social Media Has an Algorithm Problem, and Elon Musk Admits: ‘We’re Being Edited’
Röhm’s app also joins a growing list of traditional social media alternatives. Anti-AI app Cara, for example, gained more than half a million users during a week in June by thwarting AI creativity. Part of the reason for its push is that Meta says it can use images, art, and posts across its platforms to train its AI; Cara was Instagram’s unique anti-AI at the right time.
