On Friday afternoon, my bosses asked me to test and explain Noplace, a new social media platform that had skyrocketed to the top of the Apple Store charts when it went from referral-only to free-for-all. When they asked me to do that with BeReal two years ago, I had fallen in love with the app and had been using it with my friends all summer, so I was excited. Maybe Noplace, billed as “MySpace for Gen Z,” would prove to be the same: a fun platform for my friends and me to play around with through the rest of the warm months. I downloaded it, impressed by its dedication to the customizable themes and colors that had defined my social media experience when I was a kid coding pet pages on Neopets and learning HTML so my LiveJournal could reflect how I felt on the inside on the outside. Here’s what I discovered.

Bright and colorful, Noplace promises to connect people with similar interests. You get a profile page, which you can customize by changing the colors and even the borders around the text boxes. Like old-school 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 best friends. Like any other platform, there’s a direct message component. And like X, there’s a tab where you can post what you’re thinking or feeling and strangers can respond.

I experimented with the app for three days, but I could never quite figure out how it connects people with similar interests. On Noplace, your interests are called “stars,” so I picked a few stars from the categories it offered: Fortnite under “video games,” for example. I noticed that 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, and added spin class to the mix. But there was never any way to find other people who chose those stars or to connect with them. They just showed up on my profile. It was a little sad, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that I just couldn’t figure it out.

I immediately started posting on the public, feed-style forum after quickly putting together a profile that was all purple, included a photo of me, and warned potential new friends that I was listening to Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever” while eating a package of dried seaweed snacks. It felt very 2004. I couldn’t believe I was spending so much time updating in real time back then, especially considering I was doing it all from a desktop computer tethered to a giant monitor in my basement in the pre-smartphone era.