James' World 2

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On Friday afternoon, my bosses asked if I’d like to test out and explain Noplace, a new social media platform that shot to the top of the Apple Store charts when it switched from referral-only to free-for-all. When they asked me to do that with BeReal two years ago, I ended up falling in love with the app and using it with my friends all summer long, so I was excited. Maybe Noplace, billed as “MySpace for Gen Z,” would turn out the same—a fun platform for my friends and me to play with for the rest of the warm months. I downloaded it, impressed by its commitment to the customizable themes and colors that defined my social media use when I was a kid coding pet pages on Neopets and learning HTML so my LiveJournal could reflect on the outside how I felt on the inside. Here’s what I found.

What is Noplace?

Noplace is bright and colorful, promising to connect people with similar interests. You get a profile page, which you’re able to customize by changing the colors and even the bezels around the text boxes. Like old-timey Facebook, there’s a “wall” where your friends can post public messages to you. Like LiveJournal, there are sections built into your profile where you can announce what you’re eating, listening to, or doing. Like MySpace, you can publicly rank your top friends. Like any other platform, there is a direct-messaging component. And like X, there’s a tab where you can post what you’re thinking or feeling and strangers can respond.

I messed around on the app for three days, but never quite figured out how it connects people with similar interests. On Noplace, your interests are called “stars,” so I selected a few stars from the categories it offered up: Fortnite under “video games,” for instance. I noticed a lot of the possible stars were vague—”astrology,” “LGBTQ,” “reading”—so I created my own in the search bar. I went with baseball and the Minnesota Twins, then added spin class, too. But there was never a way to find other people who chose those stars or connect with them. They just appeared on my profile. It was a little sad, but I’m not ruling out the possibility that I just couldn’t figure it out.

How does Noplace work?

I started posting on the public, feed-style forum right away after quickly throwing together a profile that was all purple, featured a picture of me, and alerted any potential new friends to the fact that I was listening to “Whenever, Wherever” by Shakira while eating a package of dried seaweed snacks. It really did feel very 2004. I couldn’t believe I used to spend so much time on real-time updates back then, especially considering I was doing it all from a desktop computer, tethered to a giant monitor in my basement in the era before smartphones.

I inquired about how to raise my “level” and someone kindly responded to let me know I had to be more interactive on the app to accomplish that. I tapped their profile. They were a young teen. I started tapping more profiles I found in the feed. Everyone appeared to be between 14 and 20. It made me uncomfortable. I felt like an interloper at best and a creep at worst. Not ideal. I decided to force my friends to join, so I could at least be among some peers. That part was easy: I just had to tap an “invite friends” button in the search tab, then send them all a text. Further proof that I was way too old to be doing this came when I noticed that even after I imported my contacts, no one from the list appeared to already be on the app. Matters became more dire when two of my best friends who use Android phones told me there was no Android app at all. It was up to me and my iPhone-using pals to infiltrate on our own.

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Credit: Noplace

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