What is the new social network all about?

In recent years, the trend towards simplicity and minimalism has been evident: BeReal, where you post everything as it is, without any filters; push-button frog phones without large touchscreens for mindless TikTok scrolling; soapbox cameras that young people already call “vintage”. And of course, everyone is caught up in overloaded social networks, where users literally drown in a pile of unnecessary functions, ads and recommendations from strangers.

Now teens will be able to catch a glimpse of this early, simpler social network thanks to a new app called . nowhererecreates aspects of Myspace more than a decade after it became the most-visited site in the U.S. The app officially launched earlier this month and quickly took the top spot on the App Store.

The Noplace service positions itself as an alternative to the main algorithms of social networks and the culture of creators associated with them.

I miss the old days of social media. Where people were really social, posting random updates about their lives. You had a sense of where people were in time and space,
– says project founder Tiffany Zhong.

Although Zhong says he never got to experience Myspace firsthand (he was in elementary school when it was at its peak in the early 2000s), neither place has managed to embody many of the platform’s signature elements. Each user starts with a short profile, where they can add personal information like relationship status and age, as well as fill out an “about” section in an optional format. Users can also share their interests and detail what they’re currently watching, playing, reading, and listening to. They can also embed music videos. There’s even the same “Top 10” for choosing your best friends, though it’s unclear whether the Zoomer generation knows how much trauma this Myspace feature has inflicted on its users.

Of course, Myspace peaked long before smartphone apps with a unified “design language” became the dominant medium for viewing social media. But noplace profiles, which are easy to customize, still manage to convey the signature HTML flair and clashing color schemes that distinguished and dazzled many pages on Myspace and the Internet in general in the early 2000s.

Noplace app lets you highlight your top ten friends / Noplace photos

There are other common features. All new users automatically become Zhong’s friends, which he confirms by giving a nod to Tom Anderson, also known as “Myspace Tom.” The app encourages users to add interests, called “stars,” and find like-minded friends.

Despite the strong similarities (the app was even originally called “nospace”), Zhong says that nowhere is more than a re-creation of the look and feel of Myspace. The service has a complex gamification scheme where users earn internal badges for reaching different “levels” as they use the app more. This system is not explained anywhere, but the developer says it’s intentionally “fuzzy,” with levels roughly corresponding to various actions like writing on friends’ walls and interacting with other users’ posts. There’s also a giant X (Twitter)-like central feed where users can send quick updates to everyone.

He is already living his life

While it may sound a bit complicated, early adopters are starting to use the new service in “unexpected ways,” Zhong said.

About 20% of posts last week were questions. The vision for what we’re building is to actually become a social search engine. Everyone thinks it’s a social network, but because people are already asking questions… we’re building features where you can ask questions and get crowd-sourced answers.
says Zhong, comparing it to the trend of using TikTok and YouTube as search engines.

Can this be called a positive signal? It’s hard to say yet. The same Threads from Meta, an analogue of Twitter, has now moved to a similar stage – people have not yet decided what is going on and what the new service is for, so they just ask questions on various topics, discussion and activity. Only time will tell if this will lead to anything.

Explaining the difference between his social network and its competitors, Zhong says it’s not a matter of “dial-up forcing the distinction between online and offline,” but of prioritizing self-expression over cover-up. “You’re just chasing the number of followers instead of being your true self,” says the project’s author. “It’s understandable why social networks have evolved this way, but they’re media platforms. They’re not social networks anymore.” He wants to bring back the era of real social networks.