Myspace’s Return Is Completely Unnecessary

I’m a pretty nostalgic person, so on the one hand, I get why some people are excited about the potential return of Myspace. Though far from the original social media platform, Myspace popularized the concept for tens of millions of users, allowing them to create their own little corner of the internet before it was supplanted by Facebook in 2009.

Given the growing dissatisfaction with today’s preeminent social media platforms — be it X’s embrace of far-right content, the AI slop infecting Facebook, the spread of prank and pickup artist videos on Instagram, or the general invective that often seems to characterize social media discourse — it’s no surprise that people might be yearning for a kinder, gentler, more personal experience. From the aforelinked BBC article:

A platform where users have more control, or simply feel less overwhelmed, could stand out in a crowded market.

For fans like Hawkins and Kristin, the appeal is emotional as much as practical. Both say they would return if MySpace kept its original spirit.

For now, its comeback exists mostly as a promise — a reminder of a time when social media felt a little less polished and a lot more personal.

Here’s the thing, though: You never needed Myspace or any social media platform to have something that’s “a little less polished and a lot more personal,” to have control over your online experience and create a corner of the internet that’s entirely yours for customization and expression. That’s precisely what a personal blog or website has always been for, and these days, it’s never been easier to create them.

A big reason for Myspace, Facebook, et al.‘s success is that they didn’t require you to be a web designer to have a decent online presence. These days, however, services like Micro.blog, Pagecord, and Pika make it incredibly easy to create a blog of your own and start sharing your life and interests with others. Meanwhile, Blento, Cargo, Carrd, and omg.lol allow you to create a simple, highly customizable personal homepage. (Note: Blento does require a Bluesky account.)

Another reason for the social media platforms’ success was that they made it incredibly easy to connect with your friends, family, and colleagues. You searched for someone’s name, and if they had an account, you just clicked a button and their posts began appearing in your newsfeed. You could even determine the nature of your relationship with them and control how many of their posts you saw. (Or in the case of that one friend or crazy uncle, none of their posts.) This promise of connection is arguably the main draw of social media.

But you don’t need a social media platform to connect with others. For starters, RSS allows you to subscribe to another person’s website and see only what they post, and not what some algorithm thinks you should see or some advertiser has paid to shove into your feed. Commenting lets you connect with your readers and your readers with each other, and indeed, prior to social media’s ascendancy, it wasn’t unusual for blogs to have vibrant communities in their comment sections (for better or worse). Finally, webmentions notify websites when others respond or react to them (e.g., when someone writes a blog post responding to something you’ve posted on your blog).

All of those things are certainly more involved than social media, and in a way, more limited. You can’t subscribe to someone who doesn’t have an RSS feed, for example, and configuring your site to work with webmentions does require some technical acumen. But those aren’t bad things, and in fact, they can help ameliorate one of social media’s worst aspects.

Social media platforms are specifically designed and engineered to maximize engagement, regardless of whether you’re looking at someone else’s content or posting your own. They do everything they can to reduce friction and frustration, which is precisely why they can become so addictive.

We’ve all experienced the dopamine hit that comes from scrolling Instagram to watch just one more video or reel. A similar hit occurs when you see that people have reacted to one of your posts, which makes it all the more tempting to post stuff that will get reactions. And since people tend to react more often to outrageous, controversial, and inflammatory content — human nature being what it is — there’s a further temptation to prioritize posting that sort of content. It’s a vicious cycle, but one that social media platforms have a vested interest in sustaining because such engagement is precisely how they keep making their billions of dollars.

But the friction inherent to getting updates only from those people that you follow via RSS (as opposed to some algorithm’s recommendations) is not a bad thing. Relying on RSS rather than constantly refreshing someone’s page to get their latest content creates some healthy distance. And if I no longer want to see someone’s content, I can unsubscribe without fear of it showing up again simply because an algorithm thinks it should.

There’s also some good friction in having to post a response on your own blog or website because you can’t just dash off a comment or click a “Like” button. If I have to post something on my own blog, which I own and has my name on it, then maybe I’ll think twice before dashing off a snarky or inflammatory response. (Obviously, people can blog anonymously, and trolls and other ne’er-do-wells are always going to do what they’re going to do, but I trust you get my point.)

It should be quite clear by now that one of my big soapboxes here on Opus — alongside my fervent belief that buying your favorite artists’ music is an infinitely better way to support them than streaming — is that we should all make an effort to take ownership of our online experience, and not farm that out to Big Tech. It’s far better to have your own online platform, even if you have no desire to be a blogger or — God forbid! — an influencer, than to rely on Facebook and their ilk.

Thus, when I see nostalgia for MySpace, or claims that its return will be an “antidote” to social media fatigue, I feel compelled to point out that MySpace is completely unnecessary for that. Indeed, MySpace, along with Facebook, Instagram, X, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, TikTok, and so on, have never been necessary for us to have a personalized online experience, or for us to share our thoughts and connect with each other.

They didn’t invent or enable any of that. They only made it a lot easier, and as recent years have borne out, that has not necessarily been a good thing.