Sep 03, 2024 23:00:00

SpaceHey, a retro social networking service created by a boy who had just graduated from high school, has reached 1 million users in just three and a half years

At the end of 2020,

Anton Rohm , a German who had just graduated from high school at the time, released SpaceHey , a retro social networking service that allows anyone to set up customizable profiles and message boards. SpaceHey was a product released to improve coding skills, but Rohm reports that it has exceeded 1 million users in just three and a half years.

1,000,000 - An's Blog | SpaceHey
https://blog.spacehey.com/entry?id=1245177

Rohm launched a social networking service called SpaceHey at the end of 2022, shortly after graduating from high school. Rohm said the reason he created SpaceHey was that 'we wanted our generation to experience the dawn of social media, when there were no feeds or 'likes,' but instead colorful, customizable profiles, message boards, forums, and more.'

SpaceHey is available for browsers , iOS , and Android . When I actually accessed SpaceHey on the browser version, the following simple homepage with a nostalgic atmosphere was displayed. Pages created with SpaceHey can be viewed even if you do not have an account, so try clicking on an account displayed in the Cool New People column.

You will then be presented with a page that introduces you to yourself, your interests, a link to your blog, and your friends on SpaceHey.

Users can customize their own pages in various ways, and some even went so far as to make them look like old websites.

You can also introduce your favorite videos or playlists you create on the page, and post links to other social media sites.

Initially, Rohm had no ambition to 'create a big product,' and simply enjoyed improving his coding skills while creating SpaceHey. However, SpaceHey grew beyond Rohm's expectations, and by August 2024, the number of users had exceeded 1 million.

Rome said, 'One million is an incredibly huge number, it's just crazy! If someone had told me when I was 18 years old in 2020 that SpaceHey would have more than one million users, I would never have believed it. And yet here we are now. I'm grateful for all the support I've had over the past three and a half years, the friends I've made, and the lessons I've learned from the challenges of technology and community management when running a large community.'

SpaceHey does not display personalized feeds or ads, and is an independently operated platform whose operating costs are covered by donations and merchandise sales . Rohm claims that SpaceHey is not aiming to be a social network like Facebook or X, but rather to be 'more personal, more fun, more human.'

Over the past few months, Rohm said he has been working on improving SpaceHey's existing features and making the overall experience smoother. He also said that as the number of users increases, ensuring safety becomes a challenge, so he has expanded the moderation team and improved the reporting system to prevent spam.