I Rebuilt MySpace Because I Miss the Ugly Internet

1.Introduction

I miss MySpace. This is not a fashionable opinion, but it is a sincere one. I was thirteen when MySpace peaked, which means I was exactly the right age to take it very seriously and exactly the wrong age to build anything that didn't look terrible. Somewhere between “thanks for the add” and “we use cookies to improve your experience,” the web became cleaner, more usable, and substantially less strange.

MySpace was objectively chaotic. It allowed auto-playing music, unreadable color combinations, aggressive background GIFs, and public declarations of social hierarchy in the form of a Top 8 friends list. It also let people build pages that actually felt like theirs. The ugliness was part of the point. So was the freedom.

BriSpace started as a weekend experiment to see whether I could re-create that feeling with modern tooling. The answer was yes, with one complication: once I started adding the obvious features, I kept finding more of them. Nostalgia has a tendency to become backlog.

2.Design Goals

The project was not meant to be a pixel-perfect historical artifact. I was not attempting museum-grade preservation of 2006 front-end code. The actual goal was more useful: preserve the social and aesthetic logic of the old platform while making it functional enough to be enjoyable now.

That meant keeping the parts people actually remember (Top 8, comment walls, music, theme customization, photo albums) while quietly fixing the parts people forget were terrible. I added dark mode because even nostalgia should respect your retinas. I also resisted the temptation to make the experience too polished. A certain amount of questionable taste is a feature, not a bug.

3.Implementation

The implementation is straightforward on paper and slightly ridiculous in spirit. The app uses a modern React/Next.js stack, but the interface intentionally leans into early social-web conventions: dense profile layouts, obvious decoration, and controls that make your page feel authored rather than templated.

The most interesting technical decision was restraint. It would have been easy to over-modernize everything and end up with a tasteful tribute page instead of a usable imitation. The trick was to modernize infrastructure while preserving the social awkwardness. If someone visits and thinks, “this feels just a little too sincere,” the project is probably working.

Classic mode

Dark mode

4.What the Project Revealed

Rebuilding BriSpace made one thing clear that I hadn't expected to feel so strongly about: modern social products did not merely become cleaner, they became less expressive. Standardization improved usability, but it also flattened identity. Old profile pages let people communicate personality through layout choices, terrible typography, and songs that started playing before you had any chance to object. My first profile had a Fall Out Boy autoplay and a background that could only be described as an assault on the retina. I loved it.

That freedom came with obvious costs. Pages loaded slowly. Many looked awful. Some were barely legible. But there was a feeling of ownership that is hard to reproduce inside a contemporary feed-based product. BriSpace works because the premise still resonates. People do not only miss MySpace the brand; they miss the internet behaving like a place they could personalize beyond a profile photo and a short bio.

5.Reflection

I built this partly because I genuinely miss the old web and partly because no sensible product manager would have approved it. That combination is usually how my favorite side projects start.

BriSpace is funny, but it is not only funny. It is also a small argument for software that leaves room for taste, even when that taste is terrible. Especially when it is terrible.