DowneLink

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

~ the goodbye ~

downelink was an american social network for queer kids, and most of the people on it were young and of color. i was a straight guy in turkey on msn all day. none of that is a complaint, it is just distance, plain and simple. the site and i were never going to run into each other, and looking back that is the honest shape of it. this one is reconstructed from the outside, from what other people wrote about a place they clearly loved.

the site dates itself to 2001, which puts it before myspace made the whole social-network format feel normal. a gay and lesbian community online, back when that was still a rare and slightly risky thing to build. it found its real footing across the mid-2000s. by 2007 it had around 400,000 members, and logo, mtv networks' channel aimed at gay and lesbian viewers, bought it that august. for a stretch it was one of the few corners of the web built for that crowd rather than merely putting up with them.

what strikes me reading about it now is how specific it was. its members skewed heavily toward young users of color, which was unusual for a social site of the time and clearly part of why people held onto it. it was theirs in a way the big sites never quite were.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was for ~

for a lot of the people on it, downelink was where you could be out and be online at the same time, in the same place, without having to explain yourself. the usual furniture of a mid-2000s social site, a profile and some friends, except the whole room was already the right room. for a queer teenager in a town that did not have much of that in person, a site like this was not a small thing. that is the part that comes through loudest in how people remember it.

~ the decline ~

the problem was the same one that took most of the niche networks. facebook got big enough to be everywhere and good enough at being everything, and a small identity-specific site could not match that gravity. then the phone dating apps arrived and quietly took the meeting-people job that had been a big reason to log in. squeezed from both ends, downelink slowly emptied out.

~ the long tail ~

the social network shut down in 2022, and the domain became something else entirely, a spot for sharing favorite things rather than a place to gather. the people who were on it in the 2000s still surface online now and then to talk about it like somewhere they lost, which is about the warmest send-off a dead website can get. i did not know it while it was alive. i wish the graves i write were always for things i had actually seen.

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