Anon.cafe

» see anon.cafe as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 11 January 2024 at 12:47 UTC, somebody posted a thread on the /meta/ board of a small imageboard and titled it "Anon.cafe is shutting down". The first line was administrative: Anon.cafe will cease operation as of 15 March 2024, 00:00 UTC. If you would like to migrate your communities and/or board content elsewhere, please do so before then. Nine weeks of notice, a hard timestamp, and an instruction to take your things with you.

Then came the part that explains why this grave exists. Because Anon.cafe is an independent imageboard, there will invariably be speculation that we're being forced offline by various nefarious forces, so we should also say that we've had no contact of any kind whatsoever from any such entities, or indeed from anyone at all. The decision to shut down Anon.cafe is purely our own, taken on our own initiative.

Administrators of sites in this corner of the internet almost never get to say that and be believed, because the usual ending is a payment processor, a host, a court order or a police visit. Here the operator pre-empted the conspiracy theory by name, weeks ahead, and then simply did what they said they would do on the day they said they would do it.

~ the case file ~

~ where it came from ~

The Wayback Machine's first copy of anon.cafe is 8 September 2019. That is a month after 8chan was dropped by its network provider and went dark, scattering a large number of small user-run boards with nowhere to land. Anon.cafe was one of several hosts that appeared in that window and offered space, running Lynxchan, with per-board owners and a /meta/ board for the arguments about rules.

It stayed small on purpose. No ads, no accounts, a 20 MB file limit against a 20,000 character message limit, country flags on posts, and a pixelated coffee cup for a favicon.

~ the word relaxing ~

The closing paragraph reads: we'd like to thank every anon who has ever posted here for a little over four relaxing years, and we wish every board and poster the absolute best of luck into the future, whatever it may bring. Relaxing is not a word anybody applies to imageboards, and it is the one the person who ran this one for its whole life reached for.

Two things happened on cue. ArchiveTeam ran a full grab of the site on 14 March, the day before the deadline, so the boards exist in the archive. And the domain itself went to a parking page by that August, where it still sits, serving advertising scaffolding to anyone who types the name in. The posts outlived the address, which is the correct way round and rarer than it should be.

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