So a few days ago a friend of mine was talking about how dead MySpace is now, and mentioned off-hand a little site by the name of SpaceHey. So of course being me the very first thing I did was made an account. At first this was mostly a joke, but pretty soon I discovered that it was actually a very cool place.
So far my overall experience on SpaceHey has been great. The first thing I noticed was that the community is so much more active and friendly than I originally anticipated, which was definitely a very pleasant surprise. But the other (and more important) thing is the fact that everyone just seems to interact with everyone else. Typically on the internet, there is seemingly a separation between complete strangers and good friends (you'll hardly ever talk to friends in the YouTube comment section, for example). Another issue with most sites is a distinct lack of acquaintances (in my experience it's rare to see the same redditor twice, for example). These things simply isn't the case on SpaceHey, which makes the community just feel so much closer. I love it. These two things make up the the first major advantage of SpaceHey, which is the overall great sense of community. The only other place I've ever felt this same sense of community was back about 7 years ago on Scratch when I was much younger. I believe this is in no small part because of the small size of the community (especially at that time scratch's community was relatively tiny, just like SpaceHey).
The other completely amazing aspect of SpaceHey is the HTML/CSS (programming) based customization. Now of course I am a little biased as a programmer myself, but I think that this is absolutely one of the best aspects on the site (even if it allows you to do some unholy things). Even if using raw HTML is not really practical, this level of customization is absolutely another thing that I think the modern internet with all it's fancy modern design could do with a whole lot more of. Of course I do recognize that most people are probably not going to use these tools (especially if they are code like HTML), but I think having the tools there for those who do use them and allowing those users to share what they can create as themes is a perfect solution to this problem. However, I do feel like the unfortunate truth here may be that this simply wouldn't be possible on a larger scale, both because most people wouldn't want to put in the amount of time required to customize their profile, and also because of the potential issues with moderation that come with this level of customization.
Overall, I think the main takeaway here is that the small size of this community has allowed it to offer a quite unique and generally very nice experience that simply wouldn't work on a larger platform. My hope is that the internet will go back to having many small and independent platforms like SpaceHey. Additionally this would allow each community to specialize so that it's easier to find people with shared interests. On the surface this seems completely impractical on today's internet, but SpaceHey has convinced me that this actually is possible, which has given me hope for the future of the internet. So if you're reading this and aren't on Spacehey go ahead and make an account and add me as a friend by going to my profile here.
If you've made it all the way here then thank you very much for reading and have a nice day :).