I'm eternally grateful that the social media network that I was part of throughout my teenage years abruptly disappeared from the internet, never to come back again.
Some say it was a technical failure during migration when the company was trying to pivot to file hosting, but it's impossible to verify.
Perhaps these bans are a blessing in disguise and future generations will be happy to not have their most awkward stage of life available forever, to everyone, in detail.
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 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.
A couple of decades ago, a politically active family I knew was grooming their child to be a future Prime Minister. While the poor kid had amazing privilege that other kids could only dream of, one strict rule was no Facebook or similar. Not even appearing on friends feeds (friends in a similar social strata, so workable). They could see that nobody would be getting elected to positions of power with such a documented past. Now days you of course hire someone to maintain a fake profile.
Are you referring to MySpace?
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.