Coco.gg

» see coco.gg as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Almost every site on this list picked its own last day. Coco did not. On 25 June 2024 the Paris prosecutor's office announced that the servers had been seized and the site was finished, and the people who ran it found out the way everybody else did. The operation ran across Bulgaria and Germany and Lithuania and the Netherlands and Hungary, coordinated through Eurojust, and the founder was arrested in Bulgaria the same week.

Isaac Steidl built it in 2003 as coco.fr, and the design never really moved after that. You picked a French department off a list or you picked a themed room, and you were in. There was no registration and no email address to confirm, and nothing to remember on the way back. Public rooms, private rooms, direct messages, microphone and webcam if you wanted them, all of it anonymous by default and free at the point of use.

That formula is the ordinary shape of the web around 2003 and it is remarkable mainly for having survived. Web chat rooms as a category were finished nearly everywhere by 2010, folded into social networks that knew your name. Coco kept running and kept growing. It moved to the Guernsey domain coco.gg in the early 2020s, with its servers relocated into Belgium and Germany at the same time. Traffic was around half a million visits a month in 2023 and 778,000 unique visitors a month by the time it stopped.

The absence of moderation is what the file is about. French prosecutors counted 23,051 judicial procedures connected to the platform between January 2021 and May 2024, with more than 480 victims in proceedings across the site's life. The cases that put it in the news were serious and varied, and the charge sheet against Steidl when he was put under formal investigation on 9 January 2025 covered complicity in drug trafficking along with offenses against minors. Roughly five million euros was frozen across accounts in four countries.

This one is French all the way down, and the reason it never reached me is a clock rather than a border. Room-based chat was a real thing in Turkey too in the early 2000s, on mIRC and the Turkish servers, and by the time the internet cafes emptied out it had gone. The whole category left, and nothing took its place because Messenger already knew who your friends were. What is strange about Coco is not that it existed. It is that it went on existing for another fifteen years after its own kind had stopped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ no account, no email ~

The pitch was subtraction. Every other place you could talk to strangers by 2015 wanted a phone number, and the phone number is the leash: it lets a platform ban you properly, and it lets a court find you. Coco declined to collect any of it, which is what its users liked and what eventually made it indefensible.

Anonymity by itself is not the charge. Plenty of things on this site were anonymous and died ordinary deaths. The difference is that Coco combined it with a room structure sorted by geography, so a stranger could pick the department they were physically standing in and start talking to people nearby, with nothing on file about either party afterward. That is a specific machine and it is why the case files pile up in one place instead of spreading thin.

~ twenty-one years of rooms ~

It is worth saying plainly that most of what happened on Coco was nothing. Twenty-one years of a country's chat site is overwhelmingly people being bored in the evening, and there is no archive of that part, because a site with no accounts keeps no history to archive. When the servers went into evidence, the ordinary use went with them and left only the part that had been written down by police.

That is an unusual kind of erasure. Most dead services leave the mundane traffic behind in some form: a crawl, an export, a screenshot somebody kept. Coco's whole design was to leave nothing, so the only surviving record of it is a legal one, and the legal record is by construction a record of the worst days.

~ the day the servers were seized ~

Steidl operated through a chain of companies registered in France and Hong Kong, all his, and the site had been hosted through several jurisdictions by the end. That structure is why the takedown needed five countries and a coordinating body, and it is also why it took as long as it did. A single-jurisdiction site with that case count does not last twenty-one years.

The last chapter is short. A successor called Cocoland appeared in April 2026, hosted in Australia, and French investigators opened a file on it immediately. It was shut down on 19 May 2026, five weeks later. The second attempt lasted about as long as the first one lasted in the era it was born into, which is a fair measure of how much the ground has moved.

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