And here we all are building back better on the Fediverse/Threadiverse!

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.

I didn't use MySpace, but I would imagine people saw others as people posting stuff on a community board at that point. Instead of a detached voice inside their computer.

Except for Tom.

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.

Custom CSS, sparkly gifs and flash games.

God, I loved Hypnospace Outlaw. Back when the internet was unsearchable and everyone loaded a .mid file to autoplay music on their homepage, marquee-scrolling text, skulls on fire and under construction banners.

Hypnospace Outlaw, Angelfire, Geocities and Neocities.

I miss the cringe web.

I remember mySpace and it kinda sucked. That's not to say things are better today, but it did suck.

I forget how the boards on Myspace worked, but they definitely were there as I remember chatting on them with other freshmen before moving in to college. One of the people even ended up being a close friend and eventual room mate, and this wasn't a small school.

Facebook started really taking off that fall of freshman year and I imagine most that socialization moved there by 07.

Yeah all my MySpace friends were people I made friends with on forum sites. And we were actually friends that actually spoke and messaged other. Novel concept for 'social' media, I know.

But also less people didn't used pseudonymous names. Like, are you crazy now? MaryKay@gmail.com and your actual name is Mary Kay, that's just asking for it. They should do their thing and use cool names like BDSMenthusiast2012@proton.com.

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?

i had a couple tumblr friends like that. truly a different time

Aaand every human need into economic blackmail, let's not forget that.

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.

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!"

MaryKay is a BDSM enthusiast? Mary Kay sounds fun!

Tom was hangin out on yachts with all his bitches!

........and by that I mean he had a few dogs who happened to be female.

Narrator: It did not in fact suck.

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”

I don't know, I don't know her personally, I don't know if she likes the things she does in my imagined persona.

MySpace (and a lot of early social media) was about keeping up with what was going on in your friends lives, not screaming into the void and being drowned out by brands and influencers (like I am doing now).

Dude, why the hell did you remove me from your Top 8? Unfriend.

Might have been the last time a business owner said, "That's enough money for me."

MySpace sucked. Thats my hot take. I lived through it, I know how much it sucked. Hence why we all abandoned it ASAP. You know its all true.

I will not make the Fediverse suffer the music I made in college like I did MySpace.

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 always thought that kind of social media was a recipe for bad times. Alas, most people don't care or think much, so here we are.

Less pedos too. They didn't know how to use computers, but the next generation was learning on Myspace

i have stopped saying good bye to people when i’m leaving in favor of a jaunty ‘don’t forget to like and subscribe’

Facebook got popular when I was still a freshman in high school, probably earlier, because I was a stubborn late adopter. I think my first Facebook update was trying to convince people to go back to Myspace. 🥲 Even back then I thought it was sterile and boring.

Part of me wonders how many people liked how Facebook catered to the "lowest common denominator" and didn't allow for much else. I think of how Myspace allowed people to customize their profiles extensively with HTML. A common joke is how either Neopets or Myspace taught millennials the basics of web development through allowing custom HTML. I'm curious how many people on Myspace couldn't figure HTML out and were envious of those who understood it/could make their profiles "look cool." And viola! Here is Facebook! A social media platform where no one can make fancy customizations.

I know there's plenty of other reasons Facebook succeeded, like "the feed", which made it easy for people to stay up to date on everything going on with their friend group, which of course made it an excellent vector for the enshittification and propaganda generation observed later on.

I miss the 'not actively trying to steal my soul' web

What, you don't like Boulevard of Broken Dreams, bro?!

Whats annoying is that is proven to work, ppl do that and see an uptick

well it’s resulted in three giggles and a dude pinching my ass and telling me that he always rings the notification bell.

Facebook's original feed was chronological, and unproblematic, too

and the profile customization made geocities aesthetic blush at times.

Hey but at least on my space you could put dick pics up there and get away with it. I mean allegedly of course.

There are people who play the music and people who listen to it....

I bet Zuckerberg is having as much fun with internet as a user... because obviously he does not let it ruin his journey

I'm honestly not too sure how Myspace and Neopets operate(d).

But in Denmark we have Arto, as the first "open" social media platform. Which featured custom HTML and all that jazz.

It was fun as a kid, it went out of fashion way before we all suddenly needed to get a Facebook. We had full on years, without that kind of social media. Like we all played flash games on kongregate and online MMOs like Mafia family and travian. But games like those, really spread through word of mouth.

Not every emotion, mostly fear and anger.

I can see it working on kids. Maybe because I only watch YouTube on browser not logged in, so it's a default thing to not like and subscribe. I really only tend to login to the app if there's a smaller creator I'd like to give a boost to.

When a channel aimed at a grown up audience does it, especially when they do the stupid ringing bell animation, I just find it tacky and it makes me NOT want to subscribe. Smaller channels getting started I can give a pass to, but bigger channels? It's kinda sad.

Moriah Elizabeth has 10M subscribers and I don't remember her ever asking for likes and subscribes (and a lot of her fanbase IS kids).

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.

Why not? Are we not good enough for you? 😭

I had two neopets homepages which I still can't access, because everytime I try to get my account unfrozen, I end up talking to a bot named Blake who tells me that my original freaking sign up email with the exact date and time I created the account isn't proof. Unfortunately, "can you put me through to a real human?" doesn't work :(

Neopets was just plain html, but you weren't allowed to say damn or hell and I think there may have been some tags you couldn't use. A lot of pages had a GeoCities vibe, there were custom usermade templates that were very 2000s sparkly. You could customise your shop and put profiles as well I believe. Very garish.

They even had a Neodrive online storage in the early days, I don't think I ever used it though.

I had some dude try to flirt with me on ezboard when I was 16. He offered to send a photo. My friend was with me when I got the photo and we just laughed. It was some dude probably in his 30s at least with a handlebar moustache.

you vote don't you? and even if you don't your equipment will eventually need to be replaced and your food repurchased.

that is one problem among many including extreme right wing troll bot farms and AI generated content

Now it's all Live Laugh Love!

I'm curious how many people on Myspace couldn't figure HTML out and were envious of those who understood it/could make their profiles "look cool."

Used to be websites that would have pre-made "themes" you could copy/paste into your myspace, most of those un-savvy people would just use one of those, slightly more savvy people would do that and then customize individual bits of it (to say change a color or two).