AirDine

» see airdine.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 20 February 2016 The Guardian put AirDine in a list of five sharing-economy apps worth a traveler's attention. The app had launched two days earlier. The Swedish press had got there first, in December 2015, when Veckans Affärer previewed it as the app that would throw open the doors to the Swedish kitchen.

The product was a two-sided marketplace for home dining, run out of Gothenburg by AirDine AB under Charlie Hedström. You registered as a Host or as a Guest. A host posted a dinner and a guest booked a seat, and AirDine took a service fee without ever touching the food. It operated no restaurant and inspected nobody's kitchen. Trust was supposed to arrive through reviews and shared social connections, which was the same bet Airbnb made and the same one every imitation of Airbnb made afterward.

Swedish local papers covered it the way they cover a new café, and what they covered were the hosts rather than the company. Skånska Dagbladet wrote up two brothers running a restaurant out of twenty-four square meters on 22 February 2016, then reported a successful premiere four days later. The app shipped for iOS and Android, and its interface was translated out of English into Spanish and French, which says something about where the founders thought it was going.

~ the dossier ~

~ the side that was hard ~

In May 2017 The New York Times looked at social dining and found that supply was not the problem. Cooks wanted to host. Getting paying strangers to turn up at a named apartment at a named hour was the part nobody had solved, and the piece noted that several social-dining apps had already closed. AirDine had under six months left when it ran.

A restaurant absorbs a quiet Tuesday out of its own margin. AirDine had no margin to absorb anything with, and a host who cooks for an empty table does not post a second dinner.

~ what was not checked ~

AirDine's own terms said the safety and security of the host were not vetted by the company and were left to users to judge from published reviews. For a service whose core transaction was walking into a stranger's home address and eating what they had cooked, that is a striking sentence to commit to writing. It was also completely standard. Every platform of the 2015 vintage published some version of it, and the ones that survived did so by quietly adding the checks later.

~ the error page ~

The capture record is unusually clean about the ending. The homepage served about three and a half kilobytes through July 2017, dropped to just over two kilobytes on 4 October, and returned a redirect on 20 December. From 18 March 2018 onward every capture in the record is a 521 or a 502, which is Cloudflare reporting that the origin server behind the name is not answering.

Those errors are still being served in 2026. Nobody parked the domain and nobody pointed it at a buyer. The front door still resolves on a valid certificate, and there has been nothing behind it for eight years.

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