Exactly one year ago today, I launched @SpaceHey on Product Hunt, Hacker News and Reddit. I created the initial version in about 3 weeks as a fun side-project.
Now, one year later, it's at around 400 000 users - which is unbelievable - and my life has changed A LOT since then! 🧵

So much happened this past year since I launched SpaceHey and yet it feels like it was yesterday!
Let's reflect on the launch of SpaceHey and the key events since then 👇

At around 9:30 in the morning on Nov 29, 2020, I posted SpaceHey on @ProductHunt
At first, it didn't get featured on the homepage and I was afraid no one would notice it. A short while later, my fear turned to excitement as it got featured on the homepage!
https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1332963728527077379

I remember tweeting about the launch and then going outside to put up the christmas lights. After about an hour, I got back inside, checked my phone and my Twitter notifications blew up! @rrhoover even joined SpaceHey and tweeted about it! 🤯
https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/1333078264676401154

Later that day, @m1guelpf DM'd me and suggested to post it on @HackerNews too.
I posted it with his help, and it quickly got to top #1 on the homepage 🤯
I think Miguels great title suggestion played a big part here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740 

At 9PM on that day, SpaceHey had 1000 registered users, was #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, and still pretty high up on the Hacker News homepage.
At this point, it was all still running on a simple 10€ server.

https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1333134918709284868

The next day (Nov 30), @alexisohanian (yes, THE Alexis Ohanian) even tweeted about SpaceHey!! 🤯

https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/1333216849320955905

Later that day, I got a DM from @OneJaredNewman asking me for an interview for an article for Fast Company 😲
I had a great conversation with him via DMs and answered all his questions about SpaceHey. It was my first interview ever!!

(If you are reading this, Jared: THANK YOU!!)

The next day (Dec 1), @FastCompany published the article and my phone blew up once more! A full article, just about SpaceHey, in such a huge publication!! Incredible 🤯

https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1358786835779092481

At this point, SpaceHey basically grew on its own. I launched the initial sparks by posting it on Product Hunt and Hacker News and now (thanks to the Fast Company article) it's spreading on other places like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and TikTok like a wildfire.

Meanwhile, I was busy fixing bugs, adding new features (Blogs, Bulletins, Comments, a Notification Center &amp; more), moderating the community (banning spammers), replying to tweets, emails, DMs on all platforms AND trying to manage and scale the server!

@FastCompany Oops, wrong embedded tweet! Sorry! Here's the correct one:
https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1333798254924840961

As the costs grew with better servers, I needed a way to monetize SpaceHey
I decided to order a few hundred SpaceHey stickers from a German manufacturer &amp; sell them to make some money to pay for the servers.
This is still my main monetization method today!
http://spacehey.com/shop

One month later, at the end of 2020, SpaceHey had 10 000 users.
Then the speed increased.
On Jan 5, there where 20 000 users.
On Jan 6, there where 30 000 users.
On Jan 11, 40 000 😲
https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1346414314824081408

Then, at the beginning of February 2021, @laurahday reached out to me for an interview on SpaceHey and published an amazing article on @Vice a few days later 🤯
 https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1358786835779092481

SpaceHey was growing really fast, but the Vice article turned this up to a whole new level!
3 days after the article was published, I reached 70k registered users and my server was burning!!

https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1359989641793990663

On February 26, something truly amazing happened: The amazing @willreynoldsjc wanted to interview me for BBC Radio! I had a great phone interview with him and on the same day SpaceHey reached the 100k users mark! 🤯
The interview aired a few days later.

https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1365400183006183425

After that, it became a bit calmer. The amount of daily new users decelerated a bit and became steady.
I developed a bit of a daily routine: checking SpaceHey &amp; Twitter, fixing bugs and working on new features like the long-awaited "Groups" feature.

https://twitter.com/AnTheMaker/status/1401214518206910465

Then, this summer, I got a message from the lovely folks at @tincon, a German conference for Teens! They wanted me to speak about SpaceHey in September in Hamburg!
Of course I said yes!

Thank you @spreeblick and everyone else for the amazing opportunity!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOlAyBHR0eg

At this point, SpaceHey was at around 150k registered users.

Then, two weeks ago, on Nov 12, things went REALLY crazy!
Over night, SpaceHey went viral on TikTok, Twitter AND Instagram 🤯
It even was No. 1 in the US Twitter Trends for a few hours!
https://twitter.com/thesephist/status/1458960858550308871

In just 48 hours, SpaceHey went from around 180k users to over 300k users 😲
It felt like EVERYONE was talking about SpaceHey!
My servers crashed multiple times in those days, and I went from a cluster of 5 small Servers to now 14 HUGE Servers!

https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1459264742506176512

I got way too little sleep, but the past weeks were incredible! Bloomberg wrote about SpaceHey, @DaneCook signed up and so much more happened!!
So much stuff happened that it definitely needs its own thread (soon?) 😅

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-12/retro-myspace-clone-spacehey-blows-up-with-200-000-signups

Anyways, now SpaceHey is at around 400k registered users, the traffic is incredible and most importantly: people seem to enjoy SpaceHey.
I am really happy to say that my most important values and goals I always had, are still true: building a friendly and safe space for everyone.

I am immensely grateful for all your love and support over this past year, your enthusiasm for SpaceHey and all the kind and motivating words.

I would not be at this point in my life without you: you helped me turn a fun project into a platform with 400k people on it!

One year ago, I would have never expected any of this.
It has been such an incredible journey so far and I can't wait to see where it's going next!
From the bottom of my heart, thank you to each and every one of you!
I am so thankful and appreciate every single one of you! ❤
~An

1 year of building SpaceHey

Let's build a fun 24h project!

@Netlify is running an event called #DustyDomains which encourages developers to build a site with an unused domain - and they'll donate to charity for each project submitted!

I'll build http://movie.casa - a tiny site recommending movies 👇

My plan is to build the entire project today - from the idea to the finished (and hopefully usable) site!
Let's see if it's possible!

I'm trying to share each step in this thread for you to follow along!

I got the http://movie.casa domain about a year ago on the @Namecheap marketplace because it's a pretty cool domain - but I never had the time to build anything for it. So let's change that today!

The idea is pretty simple: I want to build a site which recommends movies!

I have no idea how the site will work or look exactly yet, but I think I'll just start and see were it goes! 😅

Oh, and this project will be entirely open-source:
https://github.com/AnTheMaker/movie.casa

Okay, to the technical side: My idea is to put everything into a single, static index.html file which will be deployed to Netlify.
Maybe, I'll create a PHP script which will do some stuff when building the site.

I think I'll use the @themoviedb API to get the movie data!

I got a @themoviedb API key and figured out how to get a list of the most popular movies! 🥳

To test things out, I wrote a php script which gets executed once when building the site, which fetches the list of movies and saves it to
http://movie.casa/data.json!

I'm making progress!!

I wrote a bit of javascript to fetch the movie data from the .json file and display it! 

I added the water.css framework (by the amazing @_kognise) and a bit of custom CSS to get a cool darkmode and better-looking elements!

https://watercss.kognise.dev

TO DO:
- figure out how exactly the site will recommend movies (maybe a "Movie of the day" section?)
- design a logo
- improve the overall design

Progress!

- added a font for the headings
- added some icons (and avg rating from TMDB)
- improved the overall design a bit!

Next task: making the whole thing functional... 

Okay, so I made some performance improvements, fixed some small things and created a cron-sheduled @github action which will run every day at midnight and trigger a rebuild of the site on Netlify with the latest movie data from TMDB!

http://movie.casa

Unfortunately, I didn't have as much time as I planned today, but we have a basic running site now!
http://movie.casa - which is a fully static site - shows a list of the currently most popular movies now, automatically updated everyday at midnight. 

I'll work a bit more on it tomorrow, polish everything, add some text/about stuff, and maybe even add an "upvote" or "movie of the day" feature! 😊
Good night :)

Good morning! 😄

I just added a new section with upcoming movies! 

I added an "About" section and polished everything a bit! 👉️ http://movie.casa 

Fun 24h project - movie.casa

About two weeks ago, I found some fake @spacehey profiles on social media again... On Twitter, Instagram and TikTok to be precise. Most of them are still online today. It's so frustrating trying to get them banned 😕
(Thread)

First of all, I reported the fake Twitter profile I found, which claimed to be the "Official 24/7 SpaceHey Support" 😅
I reported it as "impersonation" in the Twitter App using my official @spacehey account - just a few hours later I got an email that it has been banned! Nice! 😊

Then, I went to the Instagram App and reported the fake profile I found there. Again, I used my official @spacehey account and selected "impersonation"...
Over a week later, the account was still online and I didn't receive a response from Instagram whatsoever... 😕

After a bit of searching the web, I found a "Trademark Report Form" from Instagram. I filled it out - providing a link to my trademark, a copy of my ID and a ton of other information. One day later, the fake account was banned! Success! 😃

Let's get to the fake account on TikTok...
You see, I never created an Account for SpaceHey on TikTok, so apparently someone else took the "@spacehey" username on there and created an account with my logo, which looks very official 😬

To report the account, I needed to create a TikTok account myself, so I created the Account "spacehey_com" and reported the fake "spacehey" account. Fast-forward one week, my report is still "open" and the account is still online. 😫

At this point, I look around the web again and find another Trademark report form, this time from TikTok. I filled it out, and they asked for even more information than Instagram did. I was really uncomfortable giving a full copy of ID and everything to them 😶

So what happened? Nothing. It's over one week later now since I filled out that last form, and I haven't heard from them since. The fake account on TikTok has over 60 followers now, my logo and the "spacehey" username which is all really bad...

A few days ago, I found another fake account on Instagram pretending to be SpaceHey. I reported it too, so let's see how this goes.

I guess there will always be new fake accounts in the future and it will always be a cat-and-mouse game to get them taken down... 😕

The bad thing is, I don't even know what they're up to. Are they phishing my users? Do they ask them for sensitive infos in their DMs? Who knows?!
Anyways, this can't really be prevented I guess - well, not unless Twitter/Instagram/TikTok decide to verify spacehey (no chance lol)

I don't really have any takeaway to share for all of this... I guess you should register a trademark, sometimes it may help when reporting fake accounts, sometimes it doesn't 🤷‍♂️
And props to @Twitter for being the fastest and most cooperative in this case!

Fake Profiles on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram

Let's create a direct messaging feature for SpaceHey! 😊

[development thread 👇]

Here's the basic design I made in the last few hours.
This is just the basic skeleton, the final design will probably look way better 😅
Now let's work on the actual messaging feature! 

Update: I'm done with the "Conversations" (Chats) Database structure and server-side code! Now, let's create the messege-sending logic!

I just finished writing the entire API for fetching and displaying messages!
Next things are sending messages and creating new chats!

Sending &amp; receiving messages works now! 🎉
Now I need to create the chat-creating logic and improve the design! 😊

Creating new Chats and switching between them works now! Also, I improved the design and overall-feeling of it!
I'll test everything now and I think I can release it to the public tomorrow! Exciting!! 🥳 

I fixed a few things and released the feature now! Enjoy 🥳
http://im.spacehey.com

Building the SpaceHey Instant Messenger

Let's make a physical SpaceHey user counter! 😊

Thread 👇 

✨ The Parts ✨

- RaspberryPi Zero W (any other RaspberryPi should work too)
- a MAX7219 7-segment display with 8 digits (I used this one: http://shiny.link/7seg)
- a few wires &amp; soldering iron
- a 5V Micro-USB Power supply

First, I soldered the included wire-connector-thingy onto the display board - then I followed this (german) Article to wire it all up: http://shiny.link/7segtut (details in next tweet) 

Here's how the 7 segment display is connected to the Raspberry Pi: 

It's time for the software!

I used the Luma LED Matrix Python Library (http://shiny.link/7seglib) to control the 7 segment display.
I modified the example script (http://shiny.link/7segscript) to call the SpaceHey server to get the current amount of users and display it every 20 secs

Now I just configured the script to run automatically every time the Raspberry Pi boots and voilà - it works! 🥳

Now, let's wait until SpaceHey reaches 50 000 users! ☺️ 

1 year of building SpaceHey

Fun 24h project - movie.casa

Fake Profiles on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram

Building the SpaceHey Instant Messenger

Fun project - LED SpaceHey user counter