I have been signing up to things on the internet since well before that was a sensible idea, and I have almost never bothered to close an account afterwards. What follows is less a list of links than a field guide, because most of it no longer exists.
The username is nearly always the same: 8lettersuk. That makes it useful for a bit of amateur internet archaeology. If you find an 8lettersuk somewhere obscure and long abandoned, it was almost certainly me.
Where I actually am now
Not many places, and not often. I have migrated away from social media almost entirely, and more deliberately I am trying to reduce my reliance on the larger American technology companies in general. Less algorithm, less lock-in, less of my life sitting on someone else’s balance sheet. It is easier said than done, as the list immediately below makes somewhat embarrassingly clear, but the direction of travel is the point.
- Bluesky I drop in every now and then. My handle is my own domain, which remains the most civilised thing about the platform.
- Instagram I still look. I almost never post.
- Last.fm Quietly scrobbling since 2007, and the only account here that has never once asked me to engage with anything. It powers my music page.
- LinkedIn Professionally unavoidable.
- Flickr Dormant, but the photostream is still standing.
- Facebook I still have an account. I would rather not discuss it.
- Twitter Emptied, not abandoned. I joined in October 2008 and deleted every post when it became X, but kept the account so that nobody else can have the username. The best part of fifteen years, and the name is still worth more than the site around it. I pulled the archive out first, using the same data portability rules I had spent years implementing in other people’s products. It now sits in a folder on my laptop, which rather proves the point: portability is not much use when there is nowhere left to port it to.
- Mastodon Joined in November 2022 with everyone else fleeing Twitter, posted 1,175 times in eight months, then stopped dead in July 2023. A textbook migration that did not take. I still think it is the right idea and still think the barrier to entry is too high for most people to bother.
- Threads A very short stint. I joined when it launched in 2023, largely out of professional curiosity, and abandoned it almost immediately once it turned out to be Instagram with extra steps and the same moderation problems as everything else Meta runs.
Why keep a list of dead websites
I have been writing at notetoself.co.uk since February 2000. Somewhere past two thousand posts it stopped being a blog and quietly became a logbook of which internet things I fell for, and exactly when. Napster in May 2000. Flickr in October 2004, eight months after it launched. Last.fm in early 2007.
Read them in order and the pattern is difficult to miss. A platform appears, promises to be different, gets good, gets funded, gets worse, and then gets switched off. What is old is new again. I went into that at rather more length when Bluesky turned up.
The graveyard
Social networks, deceased
tribe.net, one of the originals. friendster. orkut, which I think was the first place I ever used this username. myspace. bebo. piczo. peopleaggregator.net. ziki.com. meetro.com. And spock.com, a people search engine, which in hindsight sounds rather more ominous than it did at the time.
Photos
zoomr.com, which is now a car dealership. photodump.com, long gone.
Places and travel
platial.com. dopplr.com, once a genuinely elegant travel profile, now a legal practice. foursquare, which I loved, and where I may technically still be mayor of somewhere in London, right up until they split it into two apps and forgot what it was for.
Lists, bookmarks and aggregators
43things.com. stumbleupon.com. suprglu.com. thisnext.com. listofbests.com, which I have no memory of joining. And netscape.com, during its brief and confusing period as a Digg impersonator.
Contacts and identity
plaxo.com, made redundant by iCloud. zyb.com. Google Base. Google Pages. AIM Pages, which is a whole other story.
Still standing, just about
bookcrossing.com, for tracking books after you give them away. toluna.com, which I appear to be permanently unable to either log into or leave.
A confession
Two of the headstones above are partly mine. I spent a large part of my career at AOL, which bought Bebo and shipped badj.it, a hot-or-not for inanimate objects. So I did not simply watch some of these die. I helped.
There are certainly more out there. I will keep digging them up.
