I got rid of pretty much all my social media years ago, and I’ve been a happier, freer man ever since. But I’d be lying if there wasn’t part of me that still desires that dopamine fix of scrolling through a site for easily ingestible content from familiar faces or display names. That’s been ingrained into my brain ever since the heyday of online forums. So I’m more than a little interested in cyberspace.online, a social media site that is “how the internet was supposed to be” (via Hackaday).
The most immediately striking thing about it is its aesthetic, which is pulled straight from my childhood dreams of what hacking would probably be like: green terminals and lots of ‘@’ usernames. You can theme it with any colours and border sizing you like, but it comes with some pre-mades, including C64, VT320, and green Matrix options. Personally, while I don’t know if I could stand it long-term, I like the VT320 one because it reminds me of Hacker: Evolution.
Once the novelty of the theming has worn off, as it surely will, you might wonder what there is to actually do in cyberspace.online. The first thing to note on this front is actually what it doesn’t do. The dev, going by ‘The Anti-Brainrot Alliance’, says the site has no AI, videos, algorithm, suggestions, tracking, crypto, or ads. Perfect.
What it does offer is a bunch of social media features. You, of course, get a profile with which to generate posts and entries, and you also get ‘CyberMail’ (i.e. DMs), as well as IRC chats, personal notes, and a feed. The feed can be filtered by a general one, who you follow, or friends (mutual follows).
There’s also a Topics section, which can be thought of as similar to hashtags, and you can add up to three topics for each post. It seems it’ll be a good way to find posts from as-yet unfollowed people about topics you’re interested in. I’ve been told that at least two posts need to have used the same tag for it to appear in the Topics list.
(Image credit: Cyberspace Online, euklides @ Reddit)
I’m not exaggerating when I say all this is exactly what I’ve always wanted out of social media. It’s just like being back on early-2000s forums, but with a cooler aesthetic, more features all on one platform, and some useful modern functionality such as the hashtag-esque Topics system, plus other little features such as being able to save/bookmark posts and navigate the entire site with keyboard commands.
This last point is worth highlighting because it brings out a compelling case for creating a cyberdeck. I’ve always been tempted to make one, but I’ve never found a compelling enough use case, personally. This could certainly add one.
In fact, it looks like a CyberDeck might be exactly what the creator, Reddit user euklides, had in mind, as they say on the CyberDeck sub that they’re ‘making a cyber-vibe text-only social network like it’s 1987.’ I’m going to have to make a cyberdeck, aren’t I?
Plus, I suppose there’s the benefit that you might get to pass yourself off as some 1337 h4ck3r (sorry, I had to, for retro’s sake) if you’re living with some very technologically unsavvy people.
