dbna

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

~ the obituary ~

The name is an acronym and the expansion is the whole product. Du bist nicht allein. You are not alone. A German website said that to gay and bisexual teenagers for twenty-seven years and then could not afford to keep saying it.

The site opened in 1997. That is before broadband reached most German homes and well before any social network existed to be gay on, so the shape it took was a forum with an editorial section bolted to the side. The audience was stated plainly rather than implied: boys and young men from fourteen to twenty-nine.

I did not know the site existed until I went looking for German web deaths. It was German-language and it was for an audience I am not in, which puts it out of reach from Turkey twice over. What is worth recording anyway is that a site which was mostly teenagers talking to each other took a 2009 Grimme Online Award nomination in the knowledge and education category.

~ the case file ~

~ the room it was ~

By 2019 it was carrying around 130,000 registered accounts and 25.4 million page views a month. The magazine half ran pieces on coming out and on sexual health. The community half ran the forum, where a user could post a question without a name attached, which matters a great deal when the user is fifteen and still living at home.

The moderation was tighter than the category usually allows. Photo uploads were reviewed before they went up and nudity was not permitted, which kept the thing readable as a youth service rather than drifting into what most gay sites of the era drifted into.

~ what came after ~

The operation was incorporated as a GmbH in 2013, which is the point at which a volunteer project becomes something with filings to make. Eleven years later the filings won. On 18 July 2024 the community was switched off, with the team citing running costs against legal requirements it could no longer meet at that size. The rest of the site went dark by 25 July.

Today dbna.de is a gambling affiliate page in German. The .com redirects to a marketplace that lists the four letters for sale.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »