99.se

» see 99.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The oldest posts on 99.se were from April 2002, when the site was called 99mac and was exactly what the name said: a Swedish forum about Macintosh computers. That was a good moment to be a small national Mac site. Apple was still a minority platform in Europe, and the people who picked it anyway were a self-selecting kind of stubborn. The Swedish ones had somewhere to go and argue about it.

By the time anybody counted properly, on 30 April 2019, the forum held just over 150,000 threads and about 1.44 million posts. The number exists because the site was one day from closing and a volunteer wrote it down while racing the shutdown. For a country of ten million people, 1.44 million posts is not a hobby project. For seventeen years this was the Scandinavian Apple internet, more or less.

Somewhere in the middle of that run 99mac became 99.se, and the editors widened the subject from Apple products to technology generally. Plenty of long-time members never accepted it. The editorial position was that engagement had been sliding well before the rename, and that a broader site had been the attempt to fix the problem rather than the cause of it.

On 1 May 2019 the parent company, Geeks, closed it. The farewell article was headlined "Ajöss och tack för fisken!" and the reason it gave was money, stated without decoration: editors and infrastructure cost real money, and as part of Geeks the site had never turned a profit. Three people wrote that piece. The servers went dark for good sometime between 14 and 20 May.

I do not read Swedish and I was on Windows, so 99mac was never a place I could have joined. The shape of it I know very well. Around 2003 to 2006 my forums were donanimhaber and frmtr, and the detail that stays with me is the signature block: everybody carried their hardware list under every post they made, and you updated it the week you upgraded anything. A forum like that is a village where everyone wears their specifications on their chest. Sweden had the same village, in Swedish, about Macs.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the rename that split the room ~

The 99mac to 99.se change is what the farewell spends most of its words on, which tells you roughly how much mail the editors got about it. Their defense was that three people with different taste in phones and operating systems make a better tech site than three people who all own the same laptop, and that a good argument needs somebody on the other platform. Members who had been there since 2002 read it differently. They had joined a Mac forum.

Both readings can be true at once. Engagement really was already falling, and the rename really did not reverse it. No number settles whether a smaller 99mac, aimed at fewer people and costing less to run, survives past 2019.

~ what happened to the posts ~

This part is unusually good news. ArchiveTeam got there before the shutdown. Everything except the forum threads and user profiles went through ArchiveBot in two jobs, and then a volunteer pulled the threads and the profiles separately with a different tool. Attachments and avatars came down afterward in a further run of jobs, along with the external images members had hotlinked across seventeen years.

The domain then pointed at 99mac.se, and from late 2020 or early 2021 at teknikveckan.se. The posts are still readable today on a subdomain of that site, and they are locked. You can read 2002 through 2019 and you cannot add a word to it. The Swedish Apple conversation carries on next door on a Discourse board under another name, which is the ordinary fate of a forum that outlives its own software.

~ the number worth keeping ~

150,000 threads and 1.44 million posts, the oldest from April 2002, counted on 30 April 2019 by somebody who knew the site had a day left. Most dead forums never get counted at all. This one has a figure attached to it because a stranger wrote it down the day before.

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