Fitlads

» see fitlads.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Fitlads was British underneath the level of language. Everything about its register ran on class signals you would have had to grow up in England to read, and being fluent in English gets you nowhere near them from Ankara. There are sites you cannot use because of where you are, and then there are sites you could load fine and still not understand.

It launched in April 2003 as a social and dating site for gay and bisexual men in the UK, built the way British web communities were built at the time, around forums and profiles rather than a feed. Video arrived in 2008, with a rating system attached. The academic David Kreps used the site as a case study in online sexual identity and read that rating system as communicating a great deal more about sex than it did about sex itself.

Its audience was specific in a way the bigger services never were. Fitlads was for the self-described straight-acting, working-class end of the market, the scally and sportswear crowd, which is a subculture with its own vocabulary and its own dress code and almost no presence on anything American. That specificity is why it survived as long as it did and also why nothing replaced it.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

Grindr launched in 2009 and moved the whole category onto the phone. Fitlads did not die of it, which is the surprising part. A forum with regulars holds people the way a pub does, and the site kept a core for another decade while every trend line went the other way. But a hookup product loses to a device that already knows where its user is standing, and by the late 2010s the traffic was gone.

Between 2014 and 2015 the site was one of those the serial killer Stephen Port used to make first contact with victims. He held accounts across roughly a dozen services, Grindr and Gaydar among them, and the platform names came back into the British press years later through the inquest and the coverage of the police failures around it. By then most of the sites named in those reports were already gone or going.

~ the actual end ~

There was no goodbye post. new.fitlads.net, the subdomain where users actually logged in, was last captured by the Wayback Machine on 15 February 2020. The public homepage was last captured on 10 August. FL Online Limited, the Scottish company behind it, was dissolved on 24 November 2020, and that filing is the only dated record of the death that exists.

Seventeen years is a long run for a site with one country and one subculture in it. What replaced it covers neither. The apps are global by design and they flatten the local dialect out of the thing, which is fine if you were never speaking it and a real loss if you were.

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