Monticah Hawkins, left, and Melissa Kristin in their MySpace days<\/p>\n
For Monticah Hawkins, a 31-year-old real-estate agent in Atlanta, MySpace wasn't just a website \u2013 it was a ritual.<\/p>\n
"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."<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Viant, which owns MySpace, says the company does not have any updates to share "at this time."<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
"It was all very much your own little world, your own corner of the internet," Kristin says.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
"It would be best served for personal connection rather than performance," she says.<\/p>\n
"Just to recapture that high we felt as millennials when we got all the friend requests and comments. It helped us feel connected."<\/p>\n
MySpace launched in 2003 and quickly became a cultural hub, helping artists like Arctic Monkeys, Adele, and Nicki Minaj find early audiences.<\/p>\n
But its highly customised pages, auto-playing music, and busy layouts eventually became a liability.<\/p>\n
Facebook's cleaner, simpler design pulled users away, and MySpace struggled through redesigns and ownership changes before fading from mainstream use.<\/p>\n
Marketing experts say any comeback will depend on learning from that history.<\/p>\n