de.lirio.us

» see de.lirio.us as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

del.icio.us launched in 2003 and within a year had made social bookmarking into a category, which meant it also made a demand for versions of itself that you controlled. de.lirio.us was one of the answers. The name is the joke, the same domain-hack trick in the same .us registry, and the software was open source, so anybody could take it and put a bookmarking server on their own box.

The hosted instance at de.lirio.us was the demo and the real service at once, and that is where it came apart. The site developed technical problems it could not get out from under, the normal fate of a volunteer-run box carrying a userbase nobody planned for. In March 2006 the maintainer announced that Simpy, Otis Gospodnetic's full-text-searchable bookmarking service, would take over the users. The transfer finished in July 2006.

The domain outlived the project by about twenty years and spent the end of it badly. By 2025 and 2026 the address was serving a Spanish language directory of torrent sites. Short memorable domains get taken when nobody is left to watch them. It stopped resolving entirely some time after that, so the lookup now returns nothing at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ the clone problem ~

2005 and 2006 were full of these. Scuttle was the other well-known one, and between them they defined what a self-hosted bookmarking server looked like: tags instead of folders, a public page per user with an RSS feed behind every tag, and an API shaped closely enough to del.icio.us that existing tools mostly worked against it. That compatibility was the selling point and also the ceiling, since a clone tracking somebody else's API ships its features second.

The open source part held up. Code kept running on other people's servers long after the flagship instance gave up, a better outcome than most of the hosted competitors got. What the project could not supply was the thing the hosted site actually needed, which was somebody paid to keep it up.

~ where the users went ~

Simpy took them, and Simpy died too. It ran from May 2004 to around April 2010, built by a search engineer, and it ended in a thinly reported Reuters acquisition. So the de.lirio.us users were moved once in 2006 to a service that would stop existing four years later, and del.icio.us itself, the thing all of this was cloning, went through Yahoo and then to the founders of YouTube and then to Pinboard, which switched it off.

Social bookmarking in Turkey was never a mass behavior the way forums were, and I was at university through most of this, on ttnet broadband from around 2006, with a bookmarks folder in Firefox like everyone else. The appeal of a clone you could host yourself was legible to me as an engineering student and never urgent enough to act on. What the whole category got right is now ordinary and invisible: your links are tagged rather than filed, and they reach you from any machine you sit down at. What it got wrong is that almost nobody is willing to run the server that makes this true.

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