How is MySpace even comparable to today's social media? AFAIK MySpace wasn't agoritmycally driven to keep you addicted like TikTok or Instagram do. MySpace was just you and your friends from school competing on whose page is the tackiest.
I am not referring to MySpace. It was a local-to-my-country social network which was outcompeted by another local-to-my-country social network, which in turn gave way to Facebook.
I was aware of the existence of MySpace at the time, but it never had mainstream adoption locally. We also had not one but two mainstream messaging apps and hardly anyone was using MSN.
Come to think of it, Facebook killed a lot of that homegrown tech.
Early Facebook was inferior to local social networks in many ways. The real killer feature was convincing people to de-anonymize themselves on the internet.
Early facebook you weren’t really de anonymized like we consider today. For the simple fact that literally everyone you were friends with on that site were people you knew in real life. Yes you were “on the internet” but in this hyperlocal silo of real life connections entirely removed from the greater whole.
That is until they opened the site to boomers and then advertisers chasing their money.
Platform was dying for years before it was finally financially interoperable, before that they've lost over a year worth of contents due to some corrupted hardware. I can't exactly remember for sure that this happened during a migration, but the corruption of the main database was the main cause to lose that data.
In the end, there was just not enough money to justify keeping it alive.
My highschool band had tracks and videos of live performances in the school hall on there that is forever lost and I'm still bitter about it.