As Australian states begin easing up on strict lockdown measures, it’s forcing us all to look around our friendship groups and make some tough cuts. Depending on your state, you’ll soon be able to invite up to five guests around to your place of residence for a socially responsible shin-dig. It’s bringing up one dark memory: MySpace Top 8 friends.
For those of you who missed the MySpace phenomenon in the mid-to-late 2000s, it was the social media precursor to Facebook with a few, absolutely deranged features. The worst one by far was the ability to auto-play a song whenever someone visited your page, but a close second was the infamous MySpace Top 8, where you publicly ranked your friends for all to see.
Let’s say that one again, shall we? MySpace let you rank your friends, publicly. It was a key feature of the platform. No way would Instagram be the worst social media platform for our mental health; ranking your friends from top to bottom (or worse, not ranking them in your Top 8 at all) would be a playground apocalypse.
This was Kim Kardashian’s Top 8, once upon a time:
Which is to say that strict numbers on how many people you can invite round to your place is giving me serious MySpace Top 8 flashbacks.
In NSW, where I live, we’ve been officially allowed to invite two people round since last week. Two people is great!! Heaps of friendship groups can be broken down into threes, you still get a group hang, and any hypothetical third person left out of that group is only missing a really intimate dinner sesh between friends. It’s not a big thing, y’know?
But as of this Friday, we can officially invite five people around. We can even have a positively luxurious hang of up to 10 people, if it’s outside. Which is great and all, but now you know if you get left out of the 10-person hang you are officially on the outer tiers of the group, which is a bloody tough realisation.
https://twitter.com/alexgllghr/status/1258984720580239363
My point is: uhhh, I don’t really have one. I’m not going to tell you to not hang out with five-to-nine of your mates, nor am I going to tell you to keep that shit off social media.
It’s also prudent to NOT try to see as many people as possible while still sticking to the legal limits. As Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said this morning while announcing lockdown restrictions easing up: “[This] is not an invitation to host a dinner party every night of the week.”
Just know that if you feel a bit anxious about your mates hanging out without you it’s not dumb but a perfectly valid response to an unprecedented situation. This is MySpace Top 8 in real time, only now it’s being blasted all over social media.
And MySpace Tom? What in the ever-loving fuck were you thinking?
