This Site Will Transform Your Bluesky MySpace Profile
Do you remember a time when the Internet was a more chaotic, personal place? When has the experience of using social media not been so uniform? SkySpace aims to bring back those days. The site turns your Bluesky profile into a Myspace-style page with a background, music, and a section for your eight best friends. I like it.
“I miss the days when social media was more social and less media,” wrote Ste Curran , the site’s creator, in the project’s FAQ. “I miss the individuality, the ugliness, the chaos, the feeling of raising a flag on a tiny part of the Internet and saying, ‘This is mine.'”
And SkySpace certainly gets the job done, allowing you to customize almost every aspect of your profile page. Choose any image on the web as your background, including animated GIFs, and customize the fonts, color scheme, and borders. Add the song to your profile using a Spotify, Soundcloud or Apple Music link. List your interests. There’s even a version of MySpace “friends” complete with an additional top eight.
You can view the SkySpace version of any Bluesky profile, but most of them are boring. To make your post interesting, you’ll need to log in: Go to the Skyspace home page , enter your nickname Bluesky in the top right corner, then click Sign In. Bluesky will ask you to authorize SkySpace; do this and you’re in business. You can now click various edit buttons to truly customize your profile.
You can link to any image on the web to add it to your background, and then choose how the image will be positioned. You can choose the color of each panel and its transparency. You can choose the thickness and style of the line around each panel. You can even change the font and color of the text. Click “Submit” and the changes will take effect.
(The way this works is quite interesting. Your choices actually turn into a Bluesky message as a reply. SkySpace doesn’t store any of your settings on its servers—the service simply scans profiles for matching posts and displays a page using them. As the FAQ explains: “When you edit a section, the site creates a new post tagged #skyspace and sends it as a reply to the dead account @skyspacenull. This effectively hides every post from your followers, but SkySpace may see them, analyze them and turn them into something beautiful/terrible/beautiful for you.”)
Explore the rest of your page and customize everything you can. You can add a quote, location, annotations, song, and even a list of interests. This will all look familiar to MySpace veterans, as will the friends section below:
It is completely filled with your Bluesky contacts – people you follow and who also follow you. If you wish, you can choose which eight people appear here, harkening back to the most important decisions you could make on the Internet in 2005: who deserves a spot in your eight?
This site doesn’t really take us back to the friendlier, simpler Internet it was two decades ago – if only! — but it’s a good reminder of the chaos and personalization we once took for granted. I recommend checking it out.