Blurty

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

~ the eulogy ~

the english-language journaling web mostly passed turkey by. writing in public, for me and the people i knew, meant a forum: a signature block on donanimhaber with your hardware listed under it, an argument in a thread on frmtr. livejournal and the small clones that copied it were a different room in a different language, and blurty was one of the smaller ones. i never had an account. i am reconstructing it from the outside.

blurty showed up around 2002, after livejournal released its code and a dozen look-alikes appeared running the same software. it kept everything livejournal had, the friends page and the threaded comments. two things made it its own. you had to be eighteen to sign up, and it ran a personals section, which gave it a slightly more grown reputation than the teenage sprawl of the others. at its size it counted something like two million registered accounts.

what killed the clones was livejournal itself. the whole appeal of blurty and its cousins had been the lack of invite codes, you could make as many accounts as you wanted while livejournal made you wait for one. when livejournal scrapped the codes, that edge vanished and the users drifted back to the bigger site. blurty thinned out slowly across the late 2000s. sometime in the middle of 2015 a server-upgrade notice went up on the homepage promising it would be right back, and it never was. the front door just stayed shut with the sign still hanging on it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the clone wars ~

blurty was never really a company, more a copy. when brad fitzpatrick put livejournal's code out in the open, anybody could stand up their own version, and people did. deadjournal, greatestjournal, ujournal, blurty, each one competing on small differences. deadjournal leaned goth. blurty checked your age and ran a personals section. for a few years the open code meant the diary web had a dozen front doors instead of one.

~ the long tail ~

the odd thing about blurty is how quietly it ended. no lawsuit, no shutdown post explaining the decision, just a maintenance sign that outlived the maintenance. deadjournal, the goth cousin from the same code, is somehow still up in 2026 with people posting to it. blurty picked a different way to not die, staying online as a promise it never kept.

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