Diary-X

» see diary-x.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

diary-x is one of those graves whose whole meaning sits at the death. i did not use it. i was 22 in 2006 and past the teen-diary window, and it was an english-language site that ran mostly american and british users. the reason to write this obit is the specific way the site ended: one server, one disk, one uncorrected hardware failure, 120,000 diaries gone.

the site launched in 2000 under stephen deken, a solo operator who wrote the code and ran the server himself. free accounts were the default and a small paid tier let people email their entries to themselves. by the mid-2000s diary-x had roughly 120,000 registered diaries. wikipedia's own summary of the demographic is that somewhere between half and three-quarters of the users were teenagers aged 14 to 19.

in early 2006 the server's hard drive failed. deken posted the notice: there was no backup. the entire database of user journals was unrecoverable. some users had kept their own local copies of a handful of entries but the platform-side archive of six years of teenage writing was simply gone. the site closed shortly after.

~ the record ~

~ the shape of it ~

diary-x was one of the plain-text online-journal sites that lived alongside livejournal and xanga in the 2000-2006 window. it was not a social network. there were no friend graphs and no reblogging, and comments were not the central action. it was a place to write and, if you chose, to make the entries public. the audience was mostly other diarists who found each other through the site's directory.

the reason it had a large teen skew was that the ease of setup was very low and the barrier to a personal page much simpler than livejournal's community model. for many users diary-x was the first place they ever kept a written record of their days. the disk crash took six years of that.

~ the day the drive died ~

the specifics of what failed are not published in detail; deken's own notice at the time described it as an uncorrectable hardware failure and confirmed the absence of any offsite backup. the entries were not recoverable. some users kept copies of their own writing on their local machines, and a small number of pages remained in google's cache, but for most of the 120,000 accounts the loss was total.

this is the piece worth pausing on. diary-x was not a business making a cost-benefit call about backup infrastructure. it was one person running a small platform under user goodwill, and the goodwill did not translate into paid capacity for offsite storage. the platform depended on the assumption that the disk would keep working. eventually it did not.

~ what came after ~

the specific lesson of diary-x is that user goodwill is not backup infrastructure. every solo-operated platform that stored irreplaceable user writing had a version of this exposure. some of them, including livejournal in its early years, ran through similar close-call events and survived because someone paid for redundant storage in time. diary-x did not.

the wider lesson is about what happens when the platform is also the archive. teenagers writing to a hosted service in 2000-2006 largely did not keep local copies. when the service went away, so did the record. this is not a lesson the web later learned; every major social-media death since has produced a version of the same evacuation problem.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »