Chris and Tim Vanderhook, Myspace’s current owners, have shared in a new documentary that they hope to eventually relaunch the platform. They’re just waiting for the right time. As it happens, the right time is now.

Myspace wasn’t the “original” social network — that distinction belongs to SixDegrees.com, which launched in 1997 — but it was social media’s breakout moment. Founded in 2003, Myspace mainstreamed phenomena that we still wring our hands over today: bathroom selfies, oversharing, and hurting our friends with opaque digital ranking systems — “Top 8” drama, anyone?

For all its similarities to the social media sites that followed, though, Myspace had a human aspect at its core. If today’s platforms are mostly engagement treadmills, shopping apps, and casinos in which users attempt to become internet celebrities, Myspace belonged to an era when the internet could still be an extension of our offline lives instead of a replacement. That isn’t to say Myspace was some pristine, prelapsarian refuge from likes, followers, or the thirst for validation from internet strangers. It had its fair share of catfishing, drama, and compulsive use, too. But on Myspace, you connected with people you already knew, met people nearby, and found events.

Your Myspace profile was, as its name suggested, your space: your digital home. Profiles were customizable in a way that social media rarely allows today. You could change the background color, font, and cursor. You could even set a song of your choice to autoplay whenever someone navigated to your profile.

As Facebook gained ground, however, Myspace’s customizability no longer felt like liberation. After a while, it just felt ugly, and it was an ugliness that eventually became coded as low-class, according to the scholar Danah Boyd. Facebook, which overtook Myspace in worldwide traffic in April 2008 and presaged what social networking would become, offered a cleaner alternative. In contrast to Myspace, Facebook confined everything you chose to share to predetermined fields inside the same slick, blue-and-white template. It was appealing for the same reason an Apple Store was appealing: the clean, white spaces and uniformity made it feel sophisticated and high-tech. In her research, Boyd found that Facebook’s minimalism became a proxy for progress, where Myspace eventually was viewed as “gaudy” and “tacky”.

But those qualities may not feel tacky against the backdrop of today’s internet. If Myspace positions itself as an expression of individual personality — free of synthetic content — and emphasizes local connection, it might help us transition into a new era of social media. Not quite Yancey Strickler’s “dark forest”, where people retreat to private communities and group chats, but not the chaos of TikTok, where we all become would-be broadcasters, speaking to a sea of strangers. Rather, it’ll be a healthier middle ground and what social media was intended to be: a place where we can connect to people we already know, strengthen our relationships, and express ourselves.

But then, maybe thinking we can go back to a pre-2010s internet is naive. Instead, the lesson with social media may be, ultimately, that it was a failed experiment.

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Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.

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