Monticah Hawkins, left, and Melissa Kristin in their MySpace days
For Monticah Hawkins, a 31-year-old real-estate agent in Atlanta, MySpace wasn't just a website – it was a ritual.
"You could be authentic on MySpace," she says. "Upload raw images, no filters. You could have snot coming out your nose and nobody would judge."
MySpace, once the world's biggest social network, is flirting with a comeback. Its owners, brothers Tim and Chris Vanderhook, say they plan to relaunch the platform, though no date or product details have been announced.
A spokesperson for Viant, which owns MySpace, says the company does not have any updates to share "at this time."
But just the idea of a comeback has stirred nostalgia among people who remember the MySpace days of more than 20 years ago as a place where personal pages were messy, loud, and deeply individual.
It has also caught the attention of creators like Melissa Kristin, a TikTok star with more than 900,000 followers, who grew up on MySpace and remembers it as a more personal digital space.
"It was all very much your own little world, your own corner of the internet," Kristin says.
That sense of autonomy shaped how she expresses herself online today, and she believes that a revived MySpace should avoid the algorithmic, pay-to-play dynamics that dominate modern platforms.
"It would be best served for personal connection rather than performance," she says.
"Just to recapture that high we felt as millennials when we got all the friend requests and comments. It helped us feel connected."
MySpace launched in 2003 and quickly became a cultural hub, helping artists like Arctic Monkeys, Adele, and Nicki Minaj find early audiences.
But its highly customised pages, auto-playing music, and busy layouts eventually became a liability.
Facebook's cleaner, simpler design pulled users away, and MySpace struggled through redesigns and ownership changes before fading from mainstream use.
Marketing experts say any comeback will depend on learning from that history.