Craftster

» see craftster.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Craft was never my hobby and the American indie-craft internet was never my part of the map. What I recognize in Craftster is the shape rather than the room: a board index down one side, and under it a thread with photographs in it where forty replies are asking how the seam was done. I spent the same years inside forums that looked exactly like that and were about graphics cards. The software was the same and the manners were the same. The subject was not.

Leah Kramer started it on 27 June 2003. She was a programmer near Boston and she built the site herself, because the craft web that existed then was written for a different crafter than the one she was. The tagline she gave it was "no tea cozies without irony", and that single line did most of the sorting for the next sixteen years. It grew past 190,000 registered members and a million unique visitors a month. Time wrote about it. So did the Guardian. Kramer published a Craftster book in 2006 and opened a shop in Somerville that sold handmade things by the people who were posting.

On 1 December 2009 Internet Brands bought it. Craftster went into that company's home vertical in the same quarter as DavesGarden.com and SplitCoastStampers.com, part of a seven-site batch that cost roughly $8.1 million in total. Nothing much happened to it afterward. The forum ran on its own momentum for another decade while the company that owned it was busy acquiring and closing things elsewhere.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

The rule on Craftster was that you posted the method, not the object. A finished bag was worth nothing on its own. A finished bag with eleven photographs of the stages, including the two where the lining went in backwards, was the whole point of the site. People wrote full tutorials and gave them away, for a readership that would then argue about the stitch.

It sat in the window before Etsy turned craft into a storefront and before Pinterest turned it into a wall of finished images with no instructions attached to them. Craftster was the version where the instructions were the content and the object was the excuse. That version was harder to sell advertising against, which is most of the reason it did not survive its own decade.

~ the day it died ~

Internet Brands posted the notice on Craftster's Facebook page and the forum stopped on 19 December 2019. There was no sale and no handover of the archive to anyone who might have wanted it. Sixteen years of tutorials came off the web on a Thursday because a company that owned hundreds of properties had run the numbers on this one.

The members did the part the owner would not. Most of them ended up on Lettuce Craft, which is independent and small and was built by people who had been posting on Craftster for years. That is the usual ending for a community that gets sold: the software dies and the people reassemble somewhere cheaper, minus everyone who did not see the notice.

~ the long tail ~

craftster.org still resolves today. It sends you to splitcoaststampers.com, a paper-crafting community that Internet Brands bought in the same 2009 batch as Craftster. One end of a fourteen-year-old bulk purchase is now pointing at the other end.

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