The latest social media platform to take off

Key Takeaways

Noplace is bright, customizable, and reminiscent of Myspace, allowing you to connect based on interests.
Using Noplace is frustrating due to a lack of feed organization and that it’s skewed toward a younger demographic.
Noplace is ideal for younger users that feel disconnected on other platforms, but due to limitations, it may not appeal to older users.

I recently checked out Noplace, the latest social media platform designed to appeal to a younger demographic. Noplace takes a lot of inspiration from the now read-only Myspace with its colorful and customizable profiles that allow you to share everything from relationship status, to what album you’re currently listening to or book you’re currently reading. I downloaded Noplace to get a closer look and was instantly filled with nostalgia for my 2006 Myspace account. I was also quickly impressed by the sheer customizability of user profiles.

The app offers users multiple ways to express themselves. Users can add their astrology zodiac signs to their profiles, their favorite movies, games, and bands, through the use of tags, which Noplace calls “stars”. Stars are what make it easy to connect with others, allowing users to friend other Noplace accounts based on shared interests. A lot of users want a social media platform that feels more social than media, with X, Instagram, and TikTok quickly becoming marketing avenues, and Noplace hopes to capture this segment of the social media landscape.

Noplace has already surged to the coveted number one spot in the Apple App store as soon as it went from referral-only to free for everyone, but will it be the next big thing? Read on to find out what Noplace is, how it works, and whether I think it has a chance at being the next big social media platform in 2024.

noplace

Noplace aims to bring back the glory of the MySpace era, but for Gen Z. The colourful social network app is highly customizable, and at least so far, doesn’t take itself too seriously.

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What is Noplace?

Bright, colorful, and nostalgic

When you sign up for Noplace, you start off by building your profile, which you can customize by changing the colors as well as the bezels around text boxes. There’s a “wall” section, similar to Facebook’s, where your friends can post public comments on your page. If you’ve ever used early social media platforms such as LiveJournal, you’ll be familiar with the sections of the Noplace profile where you can announce what you’re listening to, eating, watching, and doing.

Similarly, if you’re nostalgic for ranking your friends, Noplace allows you to select and rank ten, just like Myspace’s top 8 friends feature. However, the most notable Noplace feature is the feed. Similar to X, there’s a live feed called “notes” where you can post whatever you’re thinking, and other users can respond in a thread. After using the app for a few days, the main feature I saw other people using was the live feed. It’s simple to throw a post up, and every user sees it. Noplace uses interest tags, or ‘stars’, so in theory, you see profiles with similar interests to your own, but I couldn’t figure out how the ‘stars’ connect you to specific people. Instead, they show you everyone on the app with those interests.

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What’s it like to use Noplace?

Frustratingly disconnected, and very young

Hopping onto Noplace, I created my profile quickly and went straight to reading posts and posting a bit myself. I had fun customizing the template for my profile and updating what stuff I was currently watching and reading, and while the customization can go pretty far, it’s simple to use. Gone are the days of learning HTML to create the perfect Myspace or LiveJournal page. I went with a green and yellow color scheme, and you can choose your colors with either a color grid, spectrum, sliders and hexcodes.

Pocket-lint / Nospace

Next, I started reading the feed and clicking on other users’ profiles in the feed. The first thing I noticed is that there’s no real organization to your feed. The stars you select don’t curate content, but instead show you posts from every user with the same interests. All the stars are pretty vague and open, but you can create your own to narrow them down. For example, “movies” is an interest you can select right when you create your account, but if you prefer, you can get a more narrow set of users by setting your star to “1970s movies” or something more specific.

The feed itself is chaotic. There’s no real way posts are organized. You can’t tag stars in a post like a hashtag on a tweet, and the first thing you’ll notice about the posts in the feed is that most of Noplace’s users are young. I’m not Gen Z, and I was pretty lost with the memes and references users on Noplace were making. I did get a sense of the same type of life-update posting and random posts I remember from the early days of Twitter, but again, finding people on Noplace or creating a curated feed felt nearly impossible.

An image of an iPhone with the Noplace app showing the feed.

Pocket-lint / Nospace

I grew up online, and it’s nice to see a place for today’s kids to do the same, but as a millennial using the app, I felt like an awkward interloper at best, and uncomfortably old at worst. The vast majority of accounts on Noplace are users aged between 14 and 20. There’s no getting around this fact that the longer you use the app, the more references you’ll encounter to “skibidi rizz.” This makes Noplace a hard sell for users my age. The majority of the posts that I came across were about anime, music recommendations, and complaints about relationships, all the same type of stuff I used to post about when I was still an angst-driven teenager.

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Should you use Noplace?

It’s a great option for young users who feel alienated by X

If you’re young and feel alienated from apps such as X, then Noplace might be a great option for you. I personally wouldn’t recommend the app to anyone in my age group. New social media platforms can be tough. They take a considerable amount of time before they attract enough regular users to make the site popular, and while Noplace has done a great job at getting many users early on, it still very much feels like an early-stage social media platform.

There’s a lot of highly complex ASCII art in user profiles, showing that some things never change, even online.

The short-form viral success of Noplace will help it develop its own community, and if the trend stays current, it has the potential to be the next big platform for young users. The downside to social media platforms that have a large youth-based user base is that the platform dies off quickly. As users age, they tend to migrate to the already popular social media websites, leaving platforms like Noplace behind.

Noplace definitely has the potential to be something that sticks around in the future. I have no doubt that older users will begin to start using the app, and probably soon. But in the meantime, it’s a pretty limited social network. There’s no way to post images or links. It’s difficult to find and connect with users you might have something in common with, and while the customization features feel great, that seems to be where the majority of users are spending their time right now on Noplace. There’s a lot of highly complex ASCII art in user profiles, showing that some things never change, even online.