Myspace wants to sell you a feed without an algorithm. Brussels is about to make that mandatory anyway.

The Vanderhook brothers, whose company Viant Technology owns Myspace, have confirmed they intend to relaunch the platform. They made the announcement in a documentary titled Myspace, which premiered at Hot Docs in Toronto and also features co-founder Chris DeWolfe.

“We still own Myspace,” Tim Vanderhook said. “We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace, we’re just waiting for the right time to do it.”

What they plan to rebuild

The revived platform is being designed around the features people remember: Top 8 friends, profile songs, and a chronological feed with no algorithm. The pitch is an antidote to endless scrolling.

There is no launch date. The brothers also acknowledged an earlier attempt that failed, with Tim saying they tried to modernise the platform but “it was a different company at that point, it wasn’t the same Myspace.”

Chris Vanderhook was blunter about why. By the time they arrived, Myspace had cycled through four sets of management and they would have been the fifth, with many staff simply done.

The differentiation problem

Here is the difficulty with launching an anti-algorithmic feed in 2026: regulators are already forcing the incumbents to offer one. The European Commission has been investigating Meta over addictive design aimed at children, and its preliminary findings told the company to disable autoplay and infinite scroll by default.

If those findings hold, chronological ordering and reduced engagement optimisation stop being a competitive feature and become a compliance baseline across Facebook and Instagram in Europe. Myspace would be selling something its rivals are legally obliged to provide.

The regulatory pressure is broad. Meta has separately been found in breach of EU law over failing to keep under-13s off its platforms, part of a wider push that also includes minimum age proposals.

Someone already built this

The anti-algorithm position is also occupied. Bluesky has passed 43 million users and raised a $100 million Series B, having built its identity on a chronological default and user-controlled feeds.

It is still iterating on exactly the problem Myspace says it wants to solve. A new app called Attie lets users construct their own feeds by describing what they want in plain language, built by the founder who stepped back from the Bluesky chief executive role to make it.

The audience question

Nostalgia is not a growth strategy. The people who remember Myspace fondly are now in their thirties and forties with careers and children, which is the demographic least likely to adopt an additional social platform.

That leaves Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who have no Myspace memories to activate and who are the focus of tightening restrictions. Europe is moving towards age limits on social media, which complicates any strategy built on winning teenagers.

What actually happened last time

Myspace launched in 2003 and was the most visited social network from 2005 to 2008. At the peak, Myspace and Facebook each drew roughly 115 million monthly visitors.

Facebook passed it on global traffic in 2008 and on US unique visitors in 2009, followed by a mass exodus in 2010. Tom Anderson, the co-founder who was everyone’s automatic first friend, sold out in 2005 and is not expected to be involved, having not posted in 13 years.

The honest case for trying

Social media fatigue is real, and the incumbents are being pushed towards designs their business models were not built for. There is a genuine opening for a platform that does not have to unwind a decade of engagement optimisation.

Whether the Myspace brand is an asset or a liability in that fight is less clear. Tim Vanderhook’s own framing suggests limited expectations: if the relaunch does not work, he said, they will do it again.