[email protected]

» see blogi.mail.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

You needed a Mail.Ru mailbox and nothing else. No separate registration, no invite code, no application. That entry condition is the whole story of [email protected], because Mail.Ru was the default free email address for an enormous number of Russian-speaking people, and on 26 November 2005 every one of those accounts quietly acquired a blog.

This never touched me. My mail was somewhere else and my alphabet was somewhere else, and the Russian blogosphere of the late 2000s was a self-contained country that Turkish users had no reason to enter. What makes it worth a grave is the scale, which is much larger than the total absence of English-language writing about it would suggest.

In its first year the service produced almost 800,000 diaries and 20,000 communities, carrying 3.5 million posts and 14.5 million comments. By 2006 it had passed LiveJournal in popularity, which in Russia was not a small claim, since LiveJournal was the political and literary center of the Russian internet. In February 2010 it passed LiveJournal again on registrations, 40 percent against 36. Autumn 2011 traffic ran at 3.3 million people a month.

It also added things LiveJournal never bothered with. Posting by SMS and reader polls arrived in 2007. Diary import and a feature that let you challenge another member to a "virtual duel" arrived in 2008, along with a Nokia Share Online app that November. A 160-character microblog format came in 2009, and by the end that format alone was carrying 2,361,681 posts a day, second in Russia only to Twitter.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

The audience skewed young against LiveJournal's, which is what you get when the barrier to entry is an email address teenagers already have. It was wired into the rest of the portal too, sitting next to the photo albums and the Mail.Ru Agent messenger. A blog was not a destination you went to, it was a surface that appeared beside everything else you were already doing on the site. In spring 2009 Kazakhstan blocked it, which is one measure of how much was being said on it.

~ the years it was winning ~

In 2007 it took best blog service of the Runet at the Red Apple advertising festival in Moscow. Prizes like that are usually noise, but the win landed in the middle of the stretch where the numbers genuinely were beating the incumbent, and Mail.Ru could say with a straight face that the largest blogging platform in Russian was theirs.

From autumn 2012 the project was simply abandoned by management. Technical faults piled up and were not fixed. Hundreds of users signed a petition asking for the old interface back, which is the sound a platform makes when its owner has already stopped listening.

~ what got buried with it ~

Commenting and new posts were switched off on 23 December 2013, so the last three months were an archive nobody could add to. On 3 March 2014 access to every page closed and a notice went up saying the blog function was moving to Moi [email protected]. What that meant in practice was that you could ask for your blog to be converted into a Moi Mir group or handed back as a single HTML file.

Eight years of Russian-language diaries were reduced to an export request. Anyone who did not file one in the window lost the lot, and there is no third-party mirror of [email protected] anywhere, because nobody outside Russia was watching closely enough to build one.

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