Anonplus

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

~ the goodbye ~

anonplus existed for about three weeks as a public thing. it was announced on 16 july 2011 after google banned a batch of anonymous-linked accounts from google+, and the response was a press release saying anonymous would build its own network. the domain went up at anonplus.com. the typography was bad and the design looked like it had been done in an afternoon.

five days later turkish hackers replaced the homepage with a mocking image of a dog in a suit. three days after that the syrian electronic army hit the same domain. two weeks later the syrian electronic army returned, this time as retaliation for anonymous activity against the syrian ministry of defense. the developers who had announced the project quietly distanced themselves from anonymous. an invite-only beta was teased in november and then nothing happened. the domain eventually expired.

i can read about this part of internet history but cannot personally remember it. anonplus was the moment a leaderless protest movement tried to ship a product and got reminded that running a website requires a server, a security model, and someone who keeps showing up. anonymous had none of those. the first turkish defacement was credited to akıncılar, a turkish hacker group whose name surfaces in this era's defacement reports and gives the story one weirdly local note for me, but i was on the engineering side of the desk in 2011 and anonplus was not in my orbit.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was supposed to be ~

the pitch was an open-source social network that would be censorship-resistant and pseudonymous. the launch site had a manifesto and a sign-up box. there was no working network behind the sign-up box. the architecture was never published, the protocol was never specified, and the only public artifact was a webpage that kept getting replaced by other people's graphics.

~ the postmortem ~

anonplus did not get a shutdown announcement. it got a slow fade. after the november 2011 invite-only beta tease, the site stopped updating. the twitter account stopped posting. the domain registration lapsed at some point during 2012. there is no farewell post because there was no formal organization to write one. that is the failure mode that fit the project: a thing that was supposed to be leaderless ended without anyone to declare it over.

~ the inheritance ~

nothing from anonplus shipped into anything that came after. diaspora was already running. mastodon was years away. the actual technical lineage of decentralized social networks runs through diaspora, friendica, and eventually the fediverse, not through a defaced wordpress install with an anonymous mask on the header. the value of the anonplus moment was negative: it showed how much actual infrastructure work sits underneath the politics of building an alternative network.

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