BobrDobr

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

~ the obituary ~

БобрДобр means roughly "beaver good," and the logo was a cartoon beaver holding a star-tipped wand. It was the Russian answer to del.icio.us, built in Moscow in the autumn of 2006 when Web 2.0 was a thing you could say out loud without irony. You saved links, you tagged them, you saw what other people had saved, and you joined groups around subjects. It also kept a copy of the page itself, so a saved link survived the page dying, which del.icio.us never bothered to do.

The domain was registered on 30 October 2006. CNews covered the project on 13 December that year and reported that the official opening would happen around New Year, with German partners involved in building the system and servers sitting in Germany.

Then the opening day happened. Maxim Spiridonov had been running a pre-launch blog that had built up a readership of several thousand people waiting for the doors to open, and when they opened, those people arrived at once and the servers went down. His partners spent days trying to repair it and the site kept failing, at one point under a load of a few dozen simultaneous users. Spiridonov posted what he later called a penitent letter, admitting they had messed it up, and left the project.

He did not stop working. Within a short stretch he had built Memori, the same idea done properly, and sold it to RBK for a few hundred thousand dollars. That was his first exit and he went on to become one of the better-known founders in the Russian internet. The thing he apologized for is the one this grave is about.

~ the case file ~

~ the crash on opening day ~

Launch-day collapse is a common enough story that it usually resolves inside a week, and this one did not resolve for the founder at all. He had spent the pre-launch period building the audience himself, on his own blog, under his own name. The audience he built is exactly what broke the servers on opening day, and he was the one who had to write to it afterward and explain.

Spiridonov's own retelling, published years later under the heading of his favorite failures, puts the repair attempts at several days and says the site kept falling over under a few dozen simultaneous users.

~ sixteen more years ~

The partners kept going. That is the surprising part of the whole file. BobrDobr did not die in 2007 with its founder's interest, it ran until the end of 2022, which makes it a sixteen-year service, longer-lived than del.icio.us under any single owner and vastly longer-lived than Ma.gnolia or Furl.

Nobody was writing about it by then. The Russian tech press covered the launch and the collapse, and then it simply kept working for a decade and a half without generating any news.

The last working homepage in the Internet Archive is dated 30 November 2022, and it still carried a live counter in the header: 33,525,100 or more bookmarks, 1,006,300 or more people, 16,827 groups. There was Google AdSense in four slots on that page, which tells you what the business model had settled into by the end.

~ what the last page said ~

The next capture, 31 December 2022, is seven hundred bytes. Every capture after that, straight through to 2026, is the nginx welcome page: "If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and working. Further configuration is required."

That is a very particular kind of ending. Nobody wrote a farewell and nobody redirected the traffic. Somebody rebuilt or replaced the server, the application was never put back on it, and the default page that ships with a fresh web server install answered on that address for the next three years. The domain now returns a bare 404 from a Go server and does not resolve to anything useful at all.

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