Once upon a time, there was a social media site called MySpace. It was the coolest shit ever in 2004, and everybody below the age of 30 was using it. MySpace was built on a server software called ColdFusion, which made it's development easier in the beginning. ColdFusion was chosen not because it was ideal, but because it lowered the barrier to entry for Tom and friends, who might not have had the skills to build a platform completely from scratch or the resources to do it in a realistic timeframe. It arguably held the site back as it grew (hard to scale it up) and gave it an increased attack surface (getting hacked). The freedom MySpace gave the user to customize their profile page and load it up with near-unlimited images, widgets, and autoplaying audio tracks while still quite limiting was not too far removed from personal websites like you'd find on GeoCities. It also functioned as a hub for sharing and spreading music, especially new music. Clicking the wrong profile could lead to your halfway decent 5 year old computer locking up as the browser struggles to render all that garbage. It happened to me a few times on my Pentium III 933. Shit was changing so fast back then, it makes this AI bullshit look like childs play. It only took Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook a few years to completely eclipse Tom's once thriving site. I'm not sure what underpinned Facebook in the early days, but I'm guessing most if not all of the infrastructure was homegrown. The development of Facebook happened over a longer time than that of MySpace, far as I know, so this is plausable to me. What didn't make sense to me is how quick it took over, because early Facebook was completely devoid of personality. It was so fucking bland in a corporate kind of way. The algorithm was continuously developed over the years to make Facebook what it is today, a shitty site with little to no user-facing value, that is mostly used by old people who's kids were using it 15 years ago, and people who want a modern alternative to craigslist. It's still wildly successful, even accounting for the Metaverse crash and burn, but not what it could have been if millenials, which were Facebook's original audience, and younger people actually wanted to use it.
MySpace didn't have much of an algorithm, and I don't think it really needed one to do what it was meant to do. Your MySpace friends were usually yoir IRL friends, and you largely found things by viewing their profiles and drilling through their friend lists. You'd friend your favorite musical acts, too, of course. MySpace was designed to connect people online and offer a chill hangout in the digital domain. Facebook was designed almost from the beginning to be algorithm driven, meaning your feed was populated by the algorithm rather than being a list of things your friends posted recently, and could include other things such as ads and product promotion.
I tried to use Facebook a long time ago, but it simply wasn't for me. I never tried IG, always saw it as a place for people looking for attention. Snapchat I've always viewed as the software equivelent of one of
Michael Milken's International Jew LeapFrog Brand childs toys. Never used Twitter either, never understood what's so important about posting 140 character messages to the Internet. Mid-2000s MySpace will forever be the "old way" for me.