MySpace Relaunch!?!

It's a good life, that's what I'm told. But everything, it all just feels the same...

IT'S HAPPENING!! If you had told teenage me that one day I'd be genuinely excited about the return of MySpace, I probably would've paused my profile song long enough to ask if Tom was still everyone's first friend.

As someone who grew up on the internet in the early 2000s, hearing that MySpace is making a comeback unlocked a level of nostalgia I wasn't prepared for. It wasn't just another social media site—it was the place to be.

Before Instagram aesthetics, TikTok algorithms, and endless doomscrolling, we had profile songs, Top 8 drama, glitter graphics, and backgrounds so busy they were practically unreadable. It was chaotic, but it was our chaos.

What made MySpace special wasn't that it looked good (because let's be honest, most of our profiles looked like a Lisa Frank explosion coded in Comic Sans). It was that every page reflected its owner. We learned basic HTML without even realizing it, spending hours tweaking layouts, changing fonts, hiding sections, and finding the perfect cursor effect. Everyone's profile had its own personality because everyone had built it themselves.

And then there was the music. Visiting someone's profile meant immediately hearing the song they had chosen to represent themselves. Whether it was Good Charlotte, Yellowcard, Taking Back Sunday, or some obscure local band, your profile song told people who you were before they even read your "About Me." MySpace helped launch countless artists, and for many of us, it was where we discovered our favorite bands.

The early internet just felt... different. We'd log onto AIM after school to see who had posted a dramatic away message. We'd update our Xanga or LiveJournal like anyone was actually reading our deepest thoughts. We'd spend way too much time on Neopets, burn mix CDs for our friends, customize our MySpace profiles until 2 a.m., and somehow still wake up for school the next morning. None of it was polished, and none of us were trying to build a brand to sell anything. We were just hanging out online and embracing the angsty version of ourselves we wanted to be.

I think that's what Millennials really miss. Today's social media often feels like a competition for attention, with algorithms deciding what we see and creators constantly chasing engagement. Back then, it felt like we were building our own little corners of the internet. It wasn't perfect, but it felt authentic, even though many of us were going through a phase of life where we didn't truly know who we were.

MySpace has made a few attempts at staying relevant over the years with new owners and a new focus, but nothing could really stick. However, this time feels different. We've reached the age of '90s and early 2000s nostalgia. Spend five minutes on social media and you'll see Millennials everywhere, clinging to the things that made growing up fun. We should be having a traditional midlife crisis but instead we're having a proverbial cigarette on our porch in between surviving one regular-life crisis after another.

So yeah... we long for the time in our lives where our biggest decision was whether we'd rent a movie or an Nintendo 64 game at Blockbuster. A time when when Capris Suns an Cosmic Brownies solved all our problems. A time when you gave someone your screenname instead of your number, and could easily control your availability through away messages. Are we annoying? Cringey? Whateva. Talk to the hand.

Will a revived MySpace ever compete with today's social platforms? Maybe not—and honestly, it doesn't have to. If it can capture even a little of what made the early internet feel so personal and creative, I'll happily dust off my coding skills & take a few dramatic peace sign selfies. I've already been letting my peeps know if they'll be in my top 8. Sorry in advance if you don't make the cut. ttyl ^_^

...but I could never live the way they want.