And here we all are building back better on the Fediverse/Threadiverse!
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.
MySpace did have the Top 8 feature, which was weird and toxic as hell. Rate your favorite friends and family members!
Yeah I really hated when they introduced that feature. People would always say to me, “wHy ArEn’T i In yOuR tOp 8?” Drove me crazy.
Now people don’t say anything at all because I’m 37 don’t have friends anymore.
that’s it, you’re # 9 now
Oh man this almost slipped my memory. Top 8 was fire in middle school. The second dagger of a breakup when you got removed.
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.
Facebook was cleaner and more organized. The thing we loved so much about Myspace was the CSS hacking and linking in mp3’s. But we aged out of that and just wanted to see old school buddies and the status of family members.
And it had a pretty generous photo upload limit too, back in the day
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.
Facebook’s original feed was chronological, and unproblematic, too
Shows not over. We still have 7 more songs in the audio player that automatically plays. Most had a visual player where you could pause, rewind, seek, ect.
A few made the player hidden, autoplay, and on repeat. Still want to hunt down those people from 20+ years ago who did this.
Did anyone here do this?
opens switchblade
Anyone?
What, you don’t like Boulevard of Broken Dreams, bro?!
mine was “The Cat Came Back The Very Next Day”
solid banger
whips out an impractically large rubber chicken in an equally threatening manner
Yeah, whatcha goin’ do bout it?
Oh, that chicken is looking at me funny. It’s gotta die now. I gotta strangle it!
What the hell??? Did you put lube all over this rubber chicken???
struggles to choke the chicken
Oh, it’s all slippery!!!
choking the chicken
This is harder than I thought…
slippery gushing noises
AHHHH!!!
Facebook originally had no feed, you had to go look at individual profiles to see what people had going on.
And the day they introduced the news feed, it was a surprise. And one guy I remember was NOT expecting that quietly removing a girl from his “in a relationship with” status would turn into a news feed item broadcast to all their friends “X IS NO LONGER IN A RELATIONSHIP WOTH Y”
Dude, why the hell did you remove me from your Top 8? Unfriend.
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.
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
I that channel
I that channel too.
OMG! I that channel so much!
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.
its been a few hours since I made this post, and I was thinking… and yeah, myspace represents an era, of pre-enshitified internet, and thats really why people remember it fondly. They remember the good times, not just with myspace, but all around it, when the internet was still interesting and not corporatified.
Just like how I remember AOL fondly, not because it was a good thing (cause it certainly fuckin wasnt), but because it was my portal to an era of the internet. Chatrooms, and webrings, and guest books, and page hit counters, and late nights talking about interesting shit with people from the other side of the world, before search google, before advertising, before enshitification.
AOL wasnt a good thing, Its the window, the memory focus, the prism, which I look through to remember all the good things around it.
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.
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.
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.
Custom CSS, sparkly gifs and flash games.
Don’t forget all the teenage girls saying “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best”.
Back before that became a stereotype of immaturity. Pretty sure it became a stereotype because 80% of girls under the age of 22 had this on their profile. If comment upvotes had existed at the time, it would have had universal upvote support.
Then those girls grew up, and we all started mocking those types of phrases. Because everyone looked back and said “well that was stupid!”
Now it’s all Live Laugh Love!
Is it 2012 already?
Pretty sure many of those girls grew up and that’s now on their facebooks. Thankfully the number of people with it is now like 5% of people instead of 80. Similar to Education: School of Hard Knocks
I wish I could link you to my angelfire website. I mean, I can. It’s still there. It’s just when I was 14 I put my real name embedded in the website. Which wasn’t a big deal in 1998. I cannot imagine doing that today.
But I had a little java script thing that let you pick the background color. Default was blue, but there were like 6 buttons for different colors.
I randomly got the urge to see where my websites were. Turns out Angelfire is still up. Geocities and MySpace are both gone.
Tripod was where I used to host my webpages after GeoCities died. They quietly died sometime in the last few years too.
I later upgraded (downgraded) from the blink and marquee tags and animated gifs. I used to use wordart to make my page header graphics and was using PNG to make the backgrounds transparent before png became fashionable (it was all jpg and gif in 2000). And no one seems to remember that PNG was pronounced ping back then and not the individual letters. Either that or Deitel and Nieto lied to 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.
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.
We should go all the way back to Livejournal, it was the best.
