Show HN: I Rebuilt MySpace from 2007 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I Rebuilt MySpace from 2007

spacehey.com

726 pointspartyguy290 comments

Totally loving this. Did you reverse engineer the layouts from screenshots? Please tell me somewhere there is a snippet of original HTML snarfed from archive.org :)

Finally you're totally missing a beat here -- MySpace lived and died by its community of indie bands. Ditch that dodgy mainstream iTunes Music wrapper and make the actual music function work again. You never know, you might strike a nostalgic retro chord within some niche of the indie community (and definitely that's where this thing should be shared!)

Hey, I'm An, the creator of SpaceHey! Thank you!! Yes, I looked at a ton of old screenshots, wikipedia sites and archive.org pages! That's how I designed most of it! I'm currently looking into all of the legal stuff which comes with music sharing, but a dedicated music feature is definitely planned! The iTunes API is just a temporary thing to fill it with some content!

What tech stack did you end up using for the backend?

for it to be legitimate you need to use ColdFusion and then do a half assed port to .net.

Hilariously, ColdFusion strikes again. I should have used pound signs around the bad_memories variable. The above code would dump the string "bad_memories".

Corrected:

I still can't believe someone came up with this syntax and thought it was a good idea.

The guy who invented that syntax was J.J. Allaire. Bill Gates passed on his advisors recommendation and didn't buy Allaire because he thought the price was too high. Instead he bought a company in Hawaii building what became ASP.net. However he was quite impressed with J.J.

But years later when J.J. started a second company, it was only a few weeks old when Gates swept in and bought it for millions of dollars.. Shut it down and moved everyone to Seattle.. He immediately assigned J.J. and his team to build a new project called Azure.

J.J. Allaire's other brother and partner in ColdFusion was Jeremy. Jeremy has started two successful companies since leaving Macromedia. They are BrightCove and Circle. I don't know about Circle but at one time parts of BrightCove were running on ColdFusion.

I don't believe that /> is needed anymore. You can just use >

I unfortunately work with coldfusion/cmfl on a daily basis at my company. I am moving the servers over to Lucee from Coldfusion 10 and trying to have any new systems built on C#/.net. The most difficult part is getting other people on board. My manager is fine with what I am doing. He saids he is too old to learn a new language so myself and the other programmer will have to support anything I built in .net

Let me tell you folks. Writing spaghetti code with no separation of concerns and no version control is not exclusive to php

> Let me tell you folks. Writing spaghetti code with no separation of concerns and no version control is not exclusive to php

Yowza. If I can give you some unsolicited advice: get some kind of version control in place! Even if it's just a local git repo at first.

There were two things that made working in ColdFusion almost tolerable. (1) The place I worked started using an MVC framework before I left. I was pleasantly surprised by how much it improved the experience. (2) Transitioning to CFScript instead of CFML tags made a big difference as well.

But at the end of the day, it's still ColdFusion, and it drove me bonkers.

I was at a CF conference with MySpace as a speaker and they talked about how often they went down but that they were switching to another CF engine with .net capabilities (BlueDragon). Their discussions and jokes about instability and going down due to bad code updates were really cringy and gave the impression that their platform was a mess.

Pretty certain we were at the same conference. There development practices horrified the group I was with in the audience. At a time that a new competitor appeared (Facebook) they made the fatal mistake of rewriting their software in dot Net. No new features for a year or more. Joel Spolsky wrote a pretty famous essay about the wisdom of doing that.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

I live by that blog post.

Thanks for this one, it encapsulates a feeling I've had for a while but could never verablize so well.

Performance was the feature. Friendster should have been social network of that era but they couldn’t scale and had to shutdown new user registration. Same thing happened to Twitter but they had no competitor in short form social networking.

Pownce?

"Twitter on steroids" [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce

I remember when Kevin Rose of Digg made a lot of noise to launch this and then it very, very quickly died.

I had an older friend that worked at CF when I was a teenager. He taught me a bit about relational databases and some other important stuff as he was one of the only developers I knew growing up.

I remember him telling me how I was wasting my time building in php/MySQL since CF was the future and serious companies wouldn't be looking for php developers. Glad I never pulled the trigger and bought their expensive IDE.

No expensive IDE was necessary and there are open source servers now. Regardless, you made the right choice.

> No expensive IDE was necessary

This is most certainly debatable

That said, that IDE was legit. It was comparable to IntelliJ. I want to say I used it over Komodo quite frequently.

For proper early 2000s nostalgia, I reckon the backend should actually be Apache mod_perl, with the ".cfm" extension script aliased to Perl CGI scripts because management tell everybody "it's running on Adobe!"...

Aah yes, mod_perl. That brings back memories.

If you had enough rack space, mod_perl+Apache2 could scale to anything you needed. Hundreds of Gbps, hundreds of thousands of RPS. Inefficient, sure, but seriously flexible+performant and really easy to deploy. I miss the old stacks, as Nginx and the other httpds really suck in comparison (feature-wise) and Java is still such a huge PITA. I'd honestly rather use modern PHP than today's Java webapps.

Some of us still run mod_perl stacks .... :)

PHP is pseudo-Java anyway so where's the win?

My wife worked there for the transition. Her very first .net page was the MySpace homepage (which was demoed by Steve Ballmer at CES, iirc). Microsoft was very unhappy with the decision to retain the .cf extension on web pages even after the transition to .net. There were some crazy levels of scaling happening behind the scenes—they had database requirements beyond the capabilities of sql server and there was code on the server side to route to different sql clusters based on the user's numeric id. They also had more page views than they could sell ads for. There was actually a pretty crazed level of new feature development happening at the same time—any time that friendster or some other site would release a new feature, Tom would insist that it be implemented on MySpace right away. At the same time, he was also requiring things like pixel-for-pixel identical output for existing pages/features through all of this.

> At the same time, he was also requiring things like pixel-for-pixel identical output for existing pages/features through all of this.

Break middle-school students' copypasta CSS rules for animated GIF backgrounds at your peril.

> to route to different sql clusters

That's called sharding and is pretty widely used nowadays. There is even readily available middleware that handles this for you, so no need to put it into the backend.

Keep in mind this is more than a decade ago. Sharding was almost certainly state-of-the-art and exotic back then (hell, it's arguably pretty unusual in the wild even today, even if a lot more mature of a concept).

Oh, of course! I did not wish to come of as arrogant. I just wanted to add the term (for easier googling if someone is interested) and a note that it's no longer necessary to modify your api to use that strategy.

IIRC, this was actually a step beyond the sharding that MS SQL supported. They were really the first people to do big data.

https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1332224148551118848?s=...

Do a soundcloud integration like poolside fm did

Yes this is a good point - people with music to share will probably have it on Soundcloud or Bandcamp already, just add Soundcloud/Bandcamp embedding and you're all set

How about the Dragon Hoard? Files are hosted on Archive.org, and have been for a year and a half without being taken down.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19569865

As someone with extremely deep contempt for Silicon Valley, Big Tech monopolies, and modern social media culture, this brought a tear to my eye.It was so easy to make new friends online once upon a time.

The fascist uniformity of modern social platforms has left a generation creatively stifled and alienated from each other. I miss the ugly comet cursors, the crummy MIDI tunes, the bad HTML, the encouragement to make new friends, and the ability to reach people without paying thousands in garbage ads.

I miss dating online without bribing some shitty algorithm. It used to be that I could click "browse," find a cute girl's profile, say hi, and set up a date within a few days. Modern social media is cold and hostile. Stay in your friend group. Avoid strangers: They're all scary and bad. Don't trust anyone (except for us, the tech company. Give us all your data for free.)

The internet used to be bohemian, weird, creative, tacky, and friendly. It was my favorite place to be. Where did that joy go? What have we become in the last 8 years?

These words are so true. I feel the same way. Nothing to add.

This. I miss that refugee camp of misfits, outcast from society, before that which haunted us came back with a vengeance.

There should be a non-cooperate sector of the web. Where all is GPL and this taint on the world could be removed.

A world without newsfeeds and algorithmically/SEO driven culture wars? A world without our social lives being manipulated by shady Big Tech firms and VCs, free of corporate surveillance? A man can dream.

That was the original dream of the internet, except replace these concerns with period-specific equivalents.

Ironically, meekmockmook's sibling comment to mine is [dead] for no discernible reason:

> A world without newsfeeds and algorithmically/SEO driven culture wars? A world without our social lives being manipulated by shady Big Tech firms and VCs, free of corporate surveillance? A man can dream.

FYI you can vouch for [dead] comments (click the direct link to that comment, then click "vouch" at the top). I just did so this one is no longer dead.

Like the indieweb? I think there’s a webring that takes you through it.

https://indieweb.org/

> The fascist uniformity of modern social platforms

It’s funny, because when Facebook was new my friends and I flocked to it FOR the uniformity! Little did we know we helped contribute to the downfall of the free and fun internet :/

Also democracy, don't forget democracy is also a victim. :P

It is a well known fact that the 20th century was overflowing with amazing democracy. We had democracy coming out of ears back then. Then Facebook came along and destroyed all that vast success humans have had with implementing and upholding fair democratic systems all over the world. It was utopia until 2007-2008 when Facebook went mainstream.

Wait, I got that all backwards. The world is more democratic today than it was in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. Facebook is a recent convenient scapegoat for the same problems humanity has had with organizing fair systems of government for thousands of years, and it's a particularly intellectually lazy scapegoat at that.

I think the comment above yours was mostly joking, or at least deliberately simplifying things.

But since we’re here and I can’t resist, I agree with you that statements like “x is destroying democracy” are meaningless hyperbole. Social media has a role in influencing the outcome of the democratic process, sure, but to say it is ERASING DEMOCRACY is ridiculous. It doesn’t mean anything. We still vote, and those votes still matter.

My nostalgia for the internet of yore and the affects of social media on democracy are pretty much divorced ideas anyway, I really did just mean for my original comment to be a funnysad observation

We may still vote but we aren't the only democracy under strain and the pressures bring put on it are even more exaggerated in other places, like those where Facebook is the internet ala mid-90's AOL, accessed on phones for free or cheap, and separate from general data plans.

I try to get away from all that by hosting a site on gopher. Neocities would be another option, if you need the eye candy.

I hate social media, going so far as to delete both my reddit and Mastodon accounts. But this is tempting. It gives me the feeling I used to get when listening to tunes and surfing last.fm

Can you elaborate on why you hate Mastodon as well? I signed up, never really got into it, but kind of always intended to.

I personally don't hate Mastodon but I've never found an instance that clicked for me. Feels like a more confusing Twitter but happy to be re-educated

BTW: Come say hi. http://spacehey.com/jdb

Try the 'small web', I'm enjoying gemini, https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

Here's the thing: gopher & gemini are, in a sense, like Facebook: extremely uniform. In that sense, they are not even BBSes, because it's practically impossible to convey self expression beyond text. Don't get me wrong: one can easily get lost in gopherholes with 20+ years of content, but it's always only content.

In contrast the web of the early 2000s was awesome, because you already could do a lot of really weird things (bouncing mouse trailing balls, anyone?) resulting in self-expressing art-like sites - the pinnacle of these kind of sites were undoubtedly the Flash era.

So yes, depends on what one is after. Maybe both are needed.

Graphics or audio needs some sort of talent and ever-so-tiny amount of skills with some editing program to make it work. Text needs merely a QWERTY (or touchscreen) keyboard, and the ability to compose text in the natural language of your choice (which most are able to do by the age of 10, barring low-literacy areas). In that sense, text is much cheaper to use for self-expression, even though necessarily limited. On the other hand, Gemini/Gopher is near-symbiotic with BBS and IRC-based communities, which are a decent text-based interactive media that could be useful for self-expression in the hands of the right people.

I agree that multimedia-based networked self-expression is limited these days, but maybe something else will spark a Gemini-like comback for multimedia in the future.

> Text needs merely a QWERTY (or touchscreen) keyboard, and the ability to compose text in the natural language of your choice

Writing is a lot more harder, than, for example, drawing. You said it yourself: "by the age of 10" compared to drawing, basically since someone can hold a crayon.

My unstated assumption was that whatever self-expression you put out there, would be at least possible to appreciate by an audience of adult humans.

I understand and believe that children should be allowed to self-express, but quite frankly, nobody is interested in hearing what the child has to say because it's mostly awkward in execution and repetitive. The relatives and perhaps people who work with children professionally will care, but the general public won't unless it's particularly funny, poignant, or whatever.

The bouncing mouse balls, flash animations, pixel dollz, and spinning flame skulls of the 2000s were mostly copied off other sites. So sure, that’s self-expression, but only in the same sense that decorating your bedroom with posters is self-expression. When it’s just text, EVERYTHING on the site is your own words. It’s all from the author. I think that’s a more ‘pure’ self-expression.

If you like the geocities style more, then you can use neocities.

Do you invent the particular words you use for self-expression? Or do you use words people know, hence copying these words?

You need common ground to make it relatable, copying stuff is inevitable.

Those were also the days when you could run your own mailserver without being subject to Google and Microsoft's arbitrary blacklisting. Days when embedding a url in an email didn't risk it being treated as junk. Days when every barely-more-than-static website wasn't an SPA carved up into components. Days when PHP was gloriously procedural. Days when Perl was still cool.

The most interesting thing to note is that MySpace was personal. The smallest facet of what MySpace was, the 50px tall little "Bulletin" feature, was the place where you talk to yourself at everyone. This, however, is what the entire internet has become, the social paradigm shift, thanks to Facebook's sterile data output container superseding it. Facebook is the MySpace "Bulletin" blown to full size, and that's what we've come to believe the web and networking are. The only saving grace for Twitter is that it's where you follow people you DON'T know, and they tend to be industry experts.

> Modern social media is cold and hostile.

Υou misspelled "monitized". I tried to play TribalWars. I remember playing this game a decade ago. It was fun. Stil it. There are so many things that could be done with 2 clicks, instead of 10. But, hey, they can be! As long as you buy/spend "premium points". I deleted my account after two weeks playing 30mins per day. To grow further I would either have to spend 1h per day (then 2h, 3h, and so on) or buy the click-reducers. I will go back to my AoE2-AOK)!!

The internet/websites/services have vastly improved. AND the pricing model has too. There are plenty of discussions in HN about "setting the correct price". That sweet spot that will yield YOU (the maker) the most profit. You don't want 1bn customers giving you $1. You want 1k customers that will give you $1.5m instead. This way you got less costs and more revenue. And you got better marketing ("everyone has an android but who can afford a cool $1k rose gold (puke) iphone???)

You want that cute guy/lady? You have to pay! (See Ashley Madison and their business model/practices)(https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and...)

You don't pay? It's ok, someone else will and will get ahead in line, and you then will suffer from FOMO (ok not exactly but you still reduce your opportunities)(gotta make it rain to the company!).

I normally don't call people out for it but you actually did misspell "monetized". ;)

> It used to be that I could click "browse," find a cute girl's profile, say hi, and set up a date within a few days.

Maybe this digital cat-calling lead to this:

> Modern social media is cold and hostile. Stay in your friend group. Avoid strangers: They're all scary and bad.

People just don't like to be annoyed by random strangers. Especially woman and specificaly when it's about molesting them.

With all due respect, MySpace was a dating site for many of both sexes. They even had a search filter based on physical attributes like any dating site.

I had a female friend set up my profile specifically for this purpose in early 2006. Within hours after signing up a random girl sent me a message to ask if I had a girlfriend. The following week I went out on 3 dates. By the end of the year I met about 30 women in person and probably went out with a dozen multiple times, until shutting things when one became my girlfriend.

Facebook was setup to work differently and I never used it for this purpose, instead moving on to OKCupid when I was single again in 2011.

It wasn't build as a dating-site and it wasn't sold as a dating-place. That some people misused it that way, doesn't mean every user is ok with this and likes to be annoyed by sex-spam. Kinda speaks for that myspace failed so fast...

We have the algorithm-drived services with all their control and reduced friction because some people just can't behave well and must destroy the nice things for everyone.

There are inherent sexual dynamics in any social circle, be it myspace, facebook or the workplace. I don't think the current trend of perceiving any unwanted sexual interest as inherently bad is at all healthy for society.

P.S: i know and remember a lot of my friends who found their S.O. through facebook so it being alive arguanly disproves the assumption behind

>Kinda speaks for that myspace failed so fast...

> There are inherent sexual dynamics in any social circle,

Yes, it maybe there, but no, It's only a problem if people make it one. It's not there by default and unavoidable.

> I don't think the current trend of perceiving any unwanted sexual interest as inherently bad is at all healthy for society.

That's a pretty hostile view.

> P.S: i know and remember a lot of my friends who found their S.O. through facebook so it being alive arguanly disproves the assumption behind

There is a difference between making friends and eventually hooking up with one/some of them, and going out to make victims on purpose.

>Yes, it maybe there, but no, It's only a problem if people make it one. It's not there by default and unavoidable.

It seems to me unavoidable that human would look for sex. The notion that sex is pillar to human endeavour has been a strongly held view of a lot of psychologists. I also don't believe sexual social dynamics are a problem (but im not sure if thats what you were saying).

>victim

This mentality underlies a very unhealthy view of dating imo. You don't have to be friends with someone prior to dating them.

> It seems to me unavoidable that human would look for sex.

Sure. But there are proper ways for it. Legal ways. There are reason why those behaviours more and more get outlawed in different countries.

If someone makes it clear they are interessted in dating, then yes, go for it. But just to exist is not a clear hint for this. Dating is still special case of social interaction, not the default.

> > victim > This mentality underlies a very unhealthy view of dating imo.

This has nothing to do with dating. The victims here are mainly the people who are forced to cope with that crap, but never asked for it, and don't wanna date any of those people for whatever reason.

The joke here is, we do have elaborated spamfilter and adblocker to get rid of all the annoying crap in our mailboxes and webbrowser, and most user accept it as neccessary because ads are just aweful. Yet we still don't have filters for dickpics and sexual harrasment. Quite funny, just because it's Humans doing the same, instead of business?

>If someone makes it clear they are interessted in dating, then yes, go for it.

But showing clear signs of interests is exactly what you seem to be against. If no one is allowed to start an interaction then how is it supposed to start?

>The victims here are mainly the people who are forced to cope with that crap, but never asked for it, and don't wanna date any of those people for whatever reason.

It seems to me like a simple fix; when someone approaches you you tell them "sorry not my type/interested/looking."

Or just block messages from people you don't know.

I'm not keen to destroy all social interactions for the sake of the people who cannot handle them.

> Yet we still don't have filters for dickpics and sexual harrasment.

I see where you're coming from, but I disagree with your solution, which is to just prevent any interaction that's sexual in nature (although dickpics are not the same thing as what op was suggesting).

Molesting? Catcalling? Holy cow, is that cynical. You think the women I met and the friends I made are victims? These are people I still stay in touch with 15 years later. Who said anything about dickpics except for you? The internet has become truly grim if any non-monetized form of looking to hook up or hang out can be considered an act of violence or harassment.

But MySpace was obviously setup to be used as a dating site and was rampantly used as such... Facebook created an environment where this type of activity would be seen as hostile.

But Facebook was also setup as a dating site. You also get recommended friends and interact with people you don't know which facilitates meeting and dating new people.

The fact that it's more hostile now I believe is only because they have switched their focus from a social circle interaction to optimizjng for metrics such as engagement and page views, which afaik generally tends to a more hostile and polarized environment.

There’s explicit marketing and implicit marketing. That you could search the population by age/height/hair color/relationship status meant implicitly, it was a dating site, albeit a crude one.

No one was misusing it for this purpose, it was obviously intended to be used this way by MySpace itself. I agree that not everyone wanted to use it that way and that was part of the friction in the platform... it was kinda meant to be everything to everyone.

> That you could search the population by age/height/hair color/relationship status meant implicitly, it was a dating site, albeit a crude one.

In the first place it means they knew about a problem, and searched for ways to solve it. It does not mean they wanted to enforce it and spread it. Relationship status is a big hint there.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with annoying people who want to be annoyed. But ignorantly bothering anyone just because you can is harmful.

If they wanted to solve it they would remove that feature entirely. Relationship status was there to facilitate. We’re just going to have to agree to disagree here.

Reminds me of Howard Beale's closing speech in Network.

What is finished... is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished, because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some 200-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-that-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods... Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word. Because good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid - creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things...

Is Zeronet what you're looking for? That allows anyone to share their creative content / website with low entry barrier.

I'm absolutely blown away by the speed of this website. Facebook and Twitter are a bloated heavy mess in comparison.

I just registered for an account and I'm getting super nostalgic. Really well done!

Edit: here's my profile in case someone wants to add me :)

https://spacehey.com/mrzool

thank you :)

Server side rendered content is better in nearly all cases. From some reason people think that offloading html/css rendering to users is somehow faster. It really isn't. My home site is faster to access half way across the world served from a raspberry pi than twitter is.

Client side rendered won't be faster all things being equal since they'll have to make at least an extra round trip request after the initial (html/js/css) requests for data from the API, but it should definitely be much cheaper since you can lean on the client's compute rather than solely your own servers.

Given the popularity of facebook/reddit/twitter/gmail etc. it seems users think client-side rendering is fast enough, and what each of those sites have in common is the impracticability of precaching every single user's version of the application anyways.

Given the popularity of facebook/reddit/gmail etc. it seems users think client-side rendering is fast enough

No, users are being forced to choose between not using those services, and using something which is clearly getting worse. There are plenty of complaints, yet the self-centered developers just don't care since they know the users will keep eating whatever shit they put out.

(...and in the case of Reddit, the existence and continuing popularity of old.reddit.com is noteworthy.)

I don't disagree that it can somewhat diminish user experience. But if users still are scrolling over posts & ads in greater numbers than ever before with cheaper running costs per user--then it does seem a superior option from a business standpoint at least...

I believe that all social networks (which are technically services) should be separated out as not simply providing a service. In the same way that the Bell Telephone System was a service, it was also inherently a social network. Owning the Bell System and selling it to people who have no alternative--because for a true alternative to exist, you would have to build a parallel Bell System--is quite a different endeavor than providing another non-social network service nationwide/worldwide. To compete against a nationwide chain of household cleaning operations, you can simply start by outcompeting them in some way in one single market. A customer who is deciding who to pay to clean their house doesn't lose out by choosing a fantastic local competitor. A customer who is deciding what social network to use to keep in touch with family and friends would be losing out if they chose an upstart social network that most of their family and friends aren't on. Even incredibly powerful and wealthy companies struggle to compete with established social media networks because no matter how good their "service" is, you aren't competing merely on how good your service is, you are competing with how many nodes are on your network.

I don't have a workable solution to how to solve this problem of social media natural monopolies, but it is a huge problem. The telephone system and the internet are the most obvious models to focus on replicating in terms of handling the problem of network effects, and to the extent that those succeed or fail in meeting the needs of their users/customers, we should at least be able to match in our solution to the problem of addressing the monopoly issues inherent in the social networks that exist or will exist in the future.

One rather radical idea I'll leave you with is -- should all communication networks be treated as one single network? In the same way that "energy" is the unifying concept that encompasses "nuclear power" and "fossil fuels", social networks, the telephone system, and the internet are all within "telecommunication". "Energy" is a lot more basic/fundamental to the laws of physics, but telecommunication is definitely universal to humans on earth now and into the future indefinitely.

>but it should definitely be much cheaper since you can lean on the client's compute rather than solely your own servers.

The only part you offload is the rendering of the final html/css. Your servers still need to serve the raw html/css, the js and the api requests. The difference between that and server rendered html is so small as to be a rounding error even for google.

>Given the popularity of facebook/reddit/twitter/gmail

Tolerance and popularity are two different things. And old reddit is still incredibly popular despite not having an update in three years.

The only time you should even think about using client side rendering is when you need an application that is seamless. Other than maps, office and full blown desktop environments there is no reason to ever use client side rendering.

Compute? Rendering JSON and HTML via a template I imagine are roughly equivalent.

You can make anything slow if you make it complex enough. I have a slow mobile and in-browser Reddit loads in about 10 seconds or so. Twitter is not much better.

> Given the popularity of facebook/reddit/twitter/gmail etc. it seems users think client-side rendering is fast enough

For gmail at least, this is both funny and sad because it was faster than the alternatives back when it was first released.

"Lean" on the client's compute. Some websites should be ashamed, because what they are doing is basically "stealing" client compute with overbearing JS. A lot of news sites, for one.

I encourage you to read this counterpoint, though:

https://qbix.com/blog/2020/01/02/the-case-for-building-clien...

That's what 10 years of hardware improvements actually looks like without 10 corresponding years of software degradation.

Underrated comment.

Strangely the opposite is true for the linux kernel - seems to run better and better on old hardware every year.

It's a shame that the userland doesn't keep up pace as well. I'm told that even old CLI utils start to get bloated now.

I feel like the hackernews-driven framework hype cycle contributes to this degradation. Unfortunately.

click click click

Oh boy:

Naruto> 3 hours ago> Hey Mark, just letting you know my son, Boruto, is looking forward to interning at FB as a graphic designer! He really wants work at Spacehey in the future, so FB is kinda like a stepping stone for him. Thanks!

The tone people are already setting up on here really does feel more like the internet back when I first got online.

Good idea. I think there’s a lot of room for some kind of internet social network that gives you a space for a custom profile, chatting with friends about anything, no algorithms dictating what you see, no heavy handed moderation, etc. wish you success

I live and breathe on the internet and have never been moderated once, even freely expressing myself, insulting people who deserve it, etc.

My point here is that if you think the current social media options have "heavy handed" moderation, you're probably the problem, not them.

I was recently moderated for the first time in my (fairly long) life by a social media site. I complained, and they restored it, but it was jarring. My general impression is that times they are a'changin' WRT moderation on the interwebs.

The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory holds up very strongly under observation:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

Small communities can sometimes survive without too much moderation, where the consequences of being shunned are enough to keep people who want to participate mostly civil to each other. But "success" in terms of rapid user base growth inevitably leads to enough members who are prepared to be uncivil to each other, at which stage the members who desire a civil discourse to either demand moderation or to leave it to become a youtube-comments style cesspit.

It's not a technical problem, it's a people problem. Technology just amplifies the problem enormously, it doesn't _cause_ it. Jerks don't last long at small local bars, because the locals set the tone and shun people who don't behave according to local norms. Large beer barns, concert venues, or festivals largely cannot rely on local norms and custom, or for regulars to guide newcomers to understanding and appropriate behaviour. And there will _always_ be some people who are jerks, or who's personal understanding of acceptable behaviour differs from the group norm. In the real world they hopefully find "their people" and their places. People who want to behave like outlaw bikers hang out in biker bars, not piano jazz clubs. If you want to build a social media site, you need to realise that eventually someone from 4chan who's idea of fun is trolling normies is gonna show up, and if the place looks "fun" to him, he can put out a call to hundreds of his friends to come show up too. You need to have a plan to deal with that before it happens, if you have a vision for your site that isn't /b/ To some people, that's gonna look like "overly heavy moderation" even if you do it right.

That just means your views are not very controversial (most people’s aren’t).

The argument you’re making is just a different face of the “I have nothing to hide” in the privacy debates.

I have controversial views (the EM Drive works! Sport is the opiate of the masses!) but I seem to get along just fine on social media. It’s really only the people who have boring, discredited political views who have problems.

> I have controversial views

This is nowhere controversial.

Try to be a constitutional originalist in the Sillicon Valley / tech sites, and we'll continue this conversation...

I'm already upset.

> Try to be a constitutional originalist in the Sillicon Valley / tech sites, and we'll continue this conversation...

I don't think it's as rare or controversial as you think, many people just haven't formed a full opinion on judicial interpretation. Textualism in particular appeals to STEM folks. We've needlessly politicized them as Red Team vs Blue Team, when they don't see themselves as anything close to that. They're all first and foremost legal nerds.

Now if you're making pro-life arguments wrapped with original intent, I can see you getting some aggressive pushback.

"EM Drive works" is not a controversial view because most people have no idea what you're talking about (I had to Google it myself).

So if I tell my EM drive to leave and come back in six months, that's a relativistic bomb, right?

“I have nothing to hide” why even say that on a hacker-site? Of course everyone has, the rules and behaviours that make one oneself. If those behaviours and the bugs within them can be replicated, one becomes a easily manipulated puppet, a zombie going were ones master wants one to go, without any reason and lots of emotions, maybe occasionally wondering why ones actions result consistently in outcomes against ones own interest.

Not an SJW here, actually a political minority here ... i see a moderate amount of moderation and banning pf groups where i hang. Sure its not china but we are not using that asa standard ..

and mate thats a ton of shaming in your tone .. please consider showing some compassion. I fail to see how his comment provoked yours ..

> SJW

Hah people still use this term unironically?

Theres a bit of lag In non english speaking spheres =}

t. SJW

More often than ever

Your assumption is that the moderator is fair. This is often not the case.

Try to point out something correct but moderately controversial.

I think I've been modded for:

- trying to get people to hate less on Russians

- on the other hand, in the same forum: trying to tell some over eager people that no, Russians aren't saints and it isn't all NATOs fault.

- pointing out (as an insider that was supposedly one of the victims in a major news story recently) that the "facts" didn't check out at all.

I fully agree, we shouldn't hate Russians, they only wish to expand their lebensraum as it is their birthright. We shouldn't blame them for doing the right thing.

I stand for what I wrote: We shouldn't hate Russian citizens.

On the other hand we should be extremely careful when their military are "helpfully" supporting "oppressed" Russian minorities in Ukraine etc etc.

Russian civilians can be asked a few easy questions, like - what happened in February 2014, or what happened in August 2008, or what is administrative status of Crimea. And this answer will help you understand should they be hated or not. Most of them, even highly educated citizens living in a capital, even those who hate their so called "president" and asking for reform, they still approve russian invasions and occupation of territories. Basically the "Empire" part is just fine, they only wish to be left alone personally.

where did you read this, I wonder

You're probably being downvoted for your comment. Does that make you the problem?

Can anyone understand this sheep's baas?

Maybe you don’t have any out of the box ideas that goes against the ideals of corporate America, but I’m certainly glad that other people do.

Imagine if current Twitter was around in Galileo’s time.

* Independent Fact Checkers have confirmed the consensus that the Earth is the center of the Universe, just as God willed it.

Or what if George Washington was relying on social media during the formation of our country?

* Independent Fact Checkers have confirmed that paying taxes to Britain is good and beneficial to the Colonies.

Many good ideas shatter the existing “consensus” dramatically. I’m glad that boundaries can and do get pushed because that’s how we come up with better ideas and systems.

That's an immature picture you are drawing there. You pretty much always trust some authority with what's a fact and what's not and twitter isn't taking that away from you. Have you verified every evidence yourself, for the things you take as premises?! I doubt it.

So let's not get all trolly problem here, alright.

(1) What's something specific you get moderated for? What's the thing you wish to express but can't in today's social media landscape? Can those things be falsified and the condition for accepting evidence?

(2) I say, there _are social networks for _every niche and kink; the only reason you would feel limited in expression and participation would be you trying to expose people to your ideas not likeminded. You have no right to be heard in every community, all the time, no right win people over everywhere, with everything. People can chose against you and your words. That's their right. A community implicitly or explicitly choosing a moderator or moderation guideline, isn't that a very democratic dynamic, too?

(3) We all know the internet changed the assumptions on independent thinking, and ignorant opinions can triumph over facts easily, if they are simpler, more convenient, more stimulating, more viral. Do you really want to be heard or do you want to win?

(4) Do you speak up, when a comment here gets downvoted to void, because the boys took offense? Have you ever fought for visibility of an argument or opinion totally against your world view, in the name of unconditional free speech?

You may just have Orthodoxy privilege:

http://www.paulgraham.com/orth.html

or in other words, if you've never had and issues with moderation, you might not ever take risks or challenges with your opinions.

I agree. Today, that's a2b2.org. it used to be makeoutclub.com

We have more than enough of places like that, there's no need to create (n+1)th. They all have the same problem - lack of adoption, so the network effect is working against them.

The Fediverse is creating a space like this. The best case is you hosting your own server and being in control of all moderation.

That's what always keeps me away from regular social networks.

It's not my page, it's not my profile, it's just like everyone else's....

And the irregular? Care to share?

Why don’t people use email or Signal/WhatsApp/iMessage for this?

Tom

Don’t forgot to have Tom be your default first friend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Anderson

This was my first thought too.

An (partyguy) and spacehey's official account are your friends when you join, just like Tom was.

no whiteboard tho :(

"but most of all, samy is my hero"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)

tom's looking a bit rough around the edges nowadays

It's tough work to spend half a billion dollars.

Maybe weird feedback but the COVID-19 Pandemic section on the front page really kills both the retro vibe and the idea that this might be something unique rather than yet another way for me to consume standard news.

I had-interestingly-the exact opposite response. It kept the waves of nostalgia in check by delivering a mild dose of modernity to the experience that was subtle enough and works so well with the rest of the presentation that I actually caught myself smiling and nodding at it.

I think maybe I'd have had the same type of reaction to you with a lighter modern news piece. The pandemic or politics are both right out, but a clearly-new entertainment piece would maybe elicit the same response from me that you've described here.

I agree, I went to myspace to get away from the hive mind and work in my space.

I've been beta testing SpaceHey since I saw An was letting some people in and I must say the nostalgia is strong. Love this site so much!

Thank you for helping me test it!! :D

Sidenote: I was in a band in High School that uploaded all its music to MySpace in 2006, and our only backups were a few CDs we had made; so when MySpace lost all that [0], it was my first, most painful lesson about backing up important things multiple times.

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/myspace-lost-m...

I had recently lost some important data back then so luckily I was already backing up data by then! Though now I have kind of the opposite problem, I have too much data and it's difficult to navigate through it all :)

Have you tried Internet Archive? You might be one of the lucky ones.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/4/18295014/myspace-lost-song...

Alas, I have tried, we were not among the lucky.

Same with me and my Geocities page from 1997 :(

Back when ISPs etc. would give you free (2-20 MB) storage, we'd use them for hosting personal websites, or just storage space - sometimes we'd register xx new/duplicate accounts, and we'd have a couple of hundred megs for storage.

Anyway, I blindly hosted a lot of personal stuff like that from 1998 - 2008, and never cared to do any backups.

But then one day, it was all gone forever - searched through my old email account, and found probably 5 remainder emails that the company was shutting down their services. Pictures, old demo songs, old websites, etc.

And these days - it could all happen again, if google ever bans your account (so go ahead and backup everything)

This happened to me as well, so sad! I fell your pain.

Yeah, high school was when I was first dicking around with FL Studio, and naturally I put it all up on MySpace without keeping track of the original MP3s. Unfortunately none of the stuff I put up got included in that Dragon Hoard archive...

Playing around with it made me realize just how much I miss those good old derpy days, and how many great times I had on myspace and then mostly forgot about. It made me a bit emotional even. Thank you!

I don't have that much time atm, but I can't wait to get into the CSS and whatnot <3

I just got an error message about too many people trying to create accounts. Keep it going! I'll buy ad space if you never sell to big media.

Same here! We're rooting for you!

Hard to not take those millions/billions. Here’s to hoping principles weigh more than money.

Many creative people got their first public attention on MySpace. Soundcloud never quite matched it. Facebook and Twitter are rat races.

A re-run of MySpace, at scale, would be a benefit to the world. I hope this takes off like a rocket (without losing its spirit.)

This is nice! And reminds me of this other very cool MySpace rebuild by artist/hacker Jankenpopp:

https://myspace.windows93.net/

Super cool! Are you considering federation a la ActivityPub et al?

Just thinking of a way for you to really stunt with what MySpace could have been that Facebook or Twitter would never do.

And even if federation is too big of a feature, maybe using the ActivityStreams format for user interactions could be beneficial.

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/

And if activitystreams are still too bloated you can look into microformats2 and webmentions (indieweb).

Website looks very very good and loads very fast imo. Just usable without fancy bells. I like this design.

Thank you :)

The rebuild doesn't appear to be using React or Angular. Keeping it true to 2007-style server-side rendering.

SSR is also 2020 style. Most websites out there use it.

You'd need to build it in ColdFusion cfm pages to really capture that original flavor. They migrated to ASP.NET at some point before everyone left.

Isn’t it great?!

I really hope this takes off! A human curated/self exploring site is a dream. I miss the myspace days when you could search by location, genre, and sort the data in various ways. I discovered so much music on my own, it was always an exciting adventure.

Looking great so far. When MySpace was at its peak, I used to run one of those "style your profile" type websites that let you generate custom CSS and all those fun things. I should try and dig it out and see if it works on SpaceHey!

Just a small CSS tip for your header and footer menus -- instead of using ::before/::after pseudo elements in your anchors themselves, if you place the menu items in a list you can use them there so the vertical pipe isn't part of the links. For example the following HTML:

  <ul class="menu">
    <li><a href="#">Link 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="#">Link 2</a></li>
  </ul>

With the following CSS:

  .menu {
    list-style: none;
    padding: 0;
    text-align: center;
  }
  .menu li {
    display: inline;
  }
  .menu li:not(:last-child)::after {
    color: #000;
    content: ' | ';
  }

Let's you add anything to the menus (anchor tag or plain text) and they will be separated by the vertical pipe without being part of the links themselves.

If it's not IE6 compatible, it's not authentic.

18 year old, cool man. Respect.

thank you :D

Could you make the login form’s email field have type=“email”? Helps on mobile.

Good idea! I changed it!

When I saw the title, I assumed I would just like it for the heck of taking a look into the past. But in reality the nostalgia hit very effectively, I really started remembering very good and interesting times on that website I had when i was a teen. You've done a really good job of capturing its magic.

I really hope this takes off. MySpace was the Geocities for the next generation. Express yourself, join a community, find new cool stuff. Facebook was the death of creativity until it eventually revived on Tumblr (and to a certain extent YouTube?).

If I have one feature request, it's a dedicated music (or any kind of event, really) scene thing that lets local people curate events and share them in a central town square, and lets randos find those local events. It could drive a whole lot of people who're not plugged into a scene to find awesome local events without having to go through some other portal, like newspaper event calendars, zines, rando facebook groups, etc. I spent a ridiculous amount of time curating events for punk shows by trawling MySpace pages because there was no other way to do it.

Will this actually stay online? I will unironically use this.

Yes, I'm planning to keep this online! I'll add more features in the coming weeks!

Dude this is actually awesome. Do you have a "buy me a beer" link so we can help out with hosting costs?

Seriously you should make this the "Wikipedia" of social media. No ads ever and people will use it.

By the way, just watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix. The world needs people like you!

Lost it at Mark Zuckerberg’s profile pic in /Browse.

lol here it goes, in case people want to see https://spacehey.com/markzuckerberg

Rofl.. Heroes Jin Yang.

Aaand here is why we can't have nice things:

> Someone is currently trying to register hundreds of accounts with fake email addresses per second. I'm trying to prevent that so in the meantime you can't sign up on http://SpaceHey.com - sorry.

I'm not sure if/when it changed on the site, but MySpace listed the time comments were made in the comment posters local timezone instead of the readers timezone. It was such a strange thing that I still remember it decades later.

Someone needs to do the same for YouTube ca. 2007

This please. I want something similar so badly. I would sign up in less than a heartbeat.

So this was what MySpace looked like. I've never seen it before. Thanks :)

Neat!

I’d sign up if there was an option to throw a few bucks your way and have absolutely guaranteed zero tracking, ads, or sharing/use of my data for anything other than what’s strictly necessary to run the site itself.

I wouldn't mind ads if they were static or, at worst, .gif. No tracking, no javascript, just a simple banner.

Id pay 5 to 10 a month for no ads at all.

I want to join, but this carries over a lot of the same problems that modern social media has developed - primarily, insight into a heavy portion of my personal data and connections, without any assurance that it won't be monetized in an untoward fashion. It sucks, but it feels like Facebook et al.'s abuse of their position has ruined this kind of centralized social media platform forever. Promises aren't enough; it has to be built into the platform structure. So I'm wary.

Sidenote: boy, do pages load fast, though. No cruft, I love it.

Nice work, I made a lot of good friends through the music section of the old MySpace and have been working on something similar. Facebook, Bandcamp, Soundcloud just aren't the same.

Someone's soon going to recreate the facebook!

Is it just me or nobody realize that the likes of MySpace started the downfall of the original Internet before it became "social media"?

Nostalgia of a simple web page is fine (and this is a nice implementation no doubt), but why recreate something that leads to something that is predictable?

Instead, recreate usenet with better privacy and mobile adoption. Usenet is what they killed before the promise of the Internet could be realized.

Myspace was great. It was pseudonymous, spent precisely no time trying to hunt down and delete opinions or nudity, and didn't have much of an opinion about how you kept your page.

Social networks could ideally be usenet without an eternal September (which is the actual thing that killed it.) You grant trust to your friends, a little less trust to your friends' friends, and a lot less trust to their friends and strangers. Without a real name policy, you can maintain different identities as different pages and can have a different account to be friends with your aunt. With very little cultivation, you can make sure everything you read is stimulating, and very little is annoying. The problem with this model is that the business of the internet is to annoy you, and the first thing you would cut if you had the ability to cut would be the messages that the platform is paid to subject you to.

MySpace had all the pieces in place to own the music download space, and somehow let iTunes eat their lunch.

I don't know how that happened, but I suspect the new owner was pulling profit out of it to support their other flailing divisions, rather than let them reinvest to finish their music platform.

They literally had all the pieces on the platform side, and it was without question the platform of choice for pretty much every independent musical artist.

Anyone have the inside story?

Darn, I'm user number 300-something, and my real first name is already taken as someone else's username.

This is really great you guys. Good job! It really makes me realize how much I miss the old internet.

Haha, I love the logo. Just a peg person saying “hey”. This takes me back for sure. I would ditch the footer disclaimer though unless you really are trying to recreate MySpace in its entirety, which is a legal grey area. I’m all on board for a MySpace-esque experience again.

I never clicked on a sign up button so quickly.

I did the vintage pose and everything https://spacehey.com/kristopolous

I just reached out to Tom Anderson of Myspace, let's see if he comes around.

How did you recreate the interface though? Most of it was behind the log-in screen which wasn't captured by archive services. Are you trying to scrap together old screenshots? Even with that, I feel like not all UI screens are represented.

Wait, where's Tom? Seriously though, with a little visual touch up this could become good.

You should definitely tell us how to donate to this effort. Bring back the old web!

Thank you so much for making this. I hated how sterile Facebook was when it finally took over.

Are these pages going to index in google? I used to find lots of "friends" by searching site:myspace.com female statename interestname

I did this too. God, dating online used to be so much fun!

A convenient way to funnel people to my Black Cauldron geocities fan page.

Nice you can add a <style> tag to your profile!

Please consider making the default colors/fonts CSS variables in the :root so that they can be easily overridden for profile page styling.

Blinking text is spot on! It’s a symbol of 90s 2000s websites.

Boss is constantly making jokes about being up on the socials with his myspace account. Now he's going to have to put his money where his mouth is.

Please tell me it's written in Cold Fusion too

Great work! I wish we were in an alternate reality where websites were still blazing fast and KISS. Just like Wikipedia and Craigslist.

But... where is Tom? And will he be my fist friend?

Tom is sooooo 2007. An is the new Tom.

Hi! I registered and tried to message you, but that feature is still being implemented :-)

Curious to see the progression from here on, great job!

despite the opinion of some others here i _loved_ the old 2008 facebook. it's so sad how it all turned out 12 years later.

I think the 2008ish version of the internet was just a much happier place. Part of why HN feels like a breath of fresh air still

> Error! You can only send one friend-request every two minutes. Please wait a minute and try again.

This is going to slow down adoption.

I'm curious, is password storage using 2007 techniques too? Or are things like that a little more up-to-date? :P

Since all MySpace passwords have been leaked online (my email often gets spammed with my real MySpace password in the subject), why not implement logins with that database?

If you built a web app in ASP.NET 1.x it would actually look a lot like this without much modification.

JK Rowling really joined this? Lol

NARUTO is back!!!

Gotta bring back the chibi art styles

I like this better than facebook.

NextDNS is complaining about the domain and blocks it. Anyone else had this issue?

Nope, I'm on NextDNS and haven't had issues since he first announced it.

Retro is somehow always in. Things always seem to come back in some shape or form.

Oh, cool. I was wondering when a better replacement for Facebook would show up.

Disappointed I wasn't immediately befriended by a friendly face: Tom.

Groups are still in progress. Those were the best part.

Can someone build An's SpaceHey Editor to match?

Just took a look at the page source. Tables--Huzzah!

I can't get past the Captcha on Firefox mobile

Is it still vulnerable to the Samy Kamkar worm?

Haha, you read my mind. Came here to search for "but most of all, samy is my hero"

What's the connection to tibush.com?

How is this not copyright infringement?

It is

IANAL but maybe the parody exception would protect them.

Kinda like, Nathan Fielder's "Dumb Starbucks".

Also, is website design even copyrightable?

I never used MySpace, but this looks cool! Good idea to build off the nostalgia. Just on first glance, I noticed you're using URLs like https://spacehey.com/profile?id=123 for accessing profiles. That seems like a bad idea, using increasing numbers for pages in general is not great, because it makes it easy to scrape for every user on the site. Why not switch to something like a UUID or random base64 code?

Just curious: Why is this post with kind words and a seemingly-helpful tip being downvoted? Is this bad advice for some reason?

Maybe it's because it's advocating for security by obscurity? It would probably be more resource-intensive for the server if a bot were to scrape every single page to collect UUIDs instead of methodically going through them.

Oh, that's interesting — I hadn't considered that creators of web apps might choose to do this to make scraping easier. Generally, I've understood that exposing internal IDs is undesirable.

[1] https://blog.jiayu.co/2018/09/methods-for-obfuscating-sequen... [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/396164/exposing-database...

One way to avoid this is to look for something requesting only profile pages, then cut them off after a certain number of requests.

All sorts of incidents have happened this way. Somebody even got arrested for pointing it out on some government website, once.

HN is full of bad actors who don't want their jobs made harder

The original myspace used the profile name for URLs - https://myspace.com/some_name - maybe the reboot will eventually. I tried with mine and it was a 404.

SpaceHey does too, but if you don't set one you get profile?id=$int

Ok, thanks. I set what I thought was a username during signup but looks like that was just the name. I see now there's a second step going to https://spacehey.com/settings and the username URL is working for me.

but most of all, samy is my hero

context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)

I sense a renaissance coming

Awesome - just made my first theme and brought back some memories. Feel free to add me and steal my theme from my about me box: https://spacehey.com/contra

How about using that funkwhale with this ? That would be cool. Right?

This is wholesome. I realized how much I miss those days. Signed up - https://spacehey.com/offgrid365

Beautiful. Nice and speedy. Works surprisingly well on my phone, too :)

Profile: https://spacehey.com/ryno

Cool. If anyone wants to connect - https://spacehey.com/profile?id=316

It doesn't appear Mark is happy

https://spacehey.com/markzuckerberg

Pretty cool, check out my profile: https://spacehey.com/t0m

Nice!! is this open source

How do you get followers? At sign up there is a flurry of views but no friend requests.

bots maybe.

This is sick. Great job. We are building a tool that enables people to build social networks. It's a platform play. as a co-founder, I really want to bring back some elements of myspace. We are focusing on solving the hardest engineering problems, such as notification, feed, moderation, analytics & ...

Check it out at www.tribe.so

And let me know if you wanna talk more on this or even join forces. For folks out there, we are hiring for any position.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

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