friends.nico

» see friends.nico as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In April 2017 I knew what Mastodon was, in the way you know about something that is briefly on every timeline you read. What I did not know, and did not find out for years afterward, was that the largest part of that month was happening in Japanese.

The rush started on 11 April 2017, when a developer going by nullkal relaunched mstdn.jp and it took on ten thousand accounts before lunchtime on the 15th and thirty thousand by that evening. Pixiv opened Pawoo on the 14th. Dwango, which runs Niconico, came third with friends.nico on Wednesday 19 April, and the timestamp on its public fork of the Mastodon source on GitHub reads 17:47 Japan time that day. By June, Pawoo was holding roughly 160,000 accounts and mstdn.jp about 130,000, with friends.nico behind them on 40,000. That was still enough to make it the third largest Mastodon server anywhere in the world.

Part of why the boom was so steep is that nullkal took a job at Dwango, and the announcement of friends.nico was folded into that news. A story about a developer joining a famous company pushed the software into Japanese mainstream coverage that it had no other route into.

Dwango announced the closure on 28 March 2019 and switched the server off at 19:00 on Sunday 28 April. The notice uses 終了, thanks everyone for using the service and asks them to keep enjoying Niconico. It offers no reason at all. The archive brackets the stated hour precisely: the last successful fetch of the server's about page is 18:56 Japan time and the same address is returning 410 Gone by late that night.

~ the record ~

~ what dwango bolted onto it ~

Dwango did real work on the software it was hosting. Linking a Niconico account was mandatory at first, and the number of linked accounts was published on the front page as its own statistic alongside users and posts, which stock Mastodon has no concept of. The favorite button was replaced with ニコる, Niconico's own reaction. There was a page at /nicomment where the timeline was rendered the way Niconico renders video comments, posts sliding horizontally across the screen instead of stacking. The Niconico video player worked inline, and the site carried the video rankings.

The house rules asked you to 「みんながニコニコできるトゥートを心がけましょう」, which means something like: try to toot in a way that lets everyone smile. The mascot was ふれんどん, Friendon, the Mastodon elephant redrawn in Niconico's house style and holding the white square Niconico face in both hands. Dwango's fork is still on GitHub, archived, last pushed on 27 April 2019, the day before the lights went out.

~ sixty-six thousand, then forty-six ~

The account count on the front page was captured often enough to reconstruct the whole curve. It reached 66,405 on 28 November 2018 and that was the high point. By 21 December the same counter reads 46,620. Somewhere in those three weeks about twenty thousand accounts came off the server, and no explanation for it was ever published. The number then climbed slowly back to 48,238, which is where it was when the server died, five months later and 27 percent below its own peak. The post count never stopped going up, finishing at 24,325,900.

~ the graduation ~

Niconico Chokaigi is Dwango's annual event at Makuhari Messe, a convention-center weekend built out of whatever Niconico happens to be. friends.nico had been exhibiting there since its first months, which ITmedia listed in June 2017 as one of the things that made it distinctive. On 25 April 2019 the friends.nico account posted that there would be a 卒業式, a graduation ceremony, in Hall 9 at 16:00 on the 28th, and that the operators intended to hand graduation certificates to everyone who came. Three hours after that ceremony opened, the server was off.

The certificate is still downloadable. The tombstone at friends.nico is served from GitHub Pages and has not been touched since January 2021, and the PDF sitting next to it reads: you have learned, in the community of friends.nico, to be kind to people and to get along with them on the internet. Hereby we certify your graduation. 28 April 2019, from all of us running friends.nico. There is a blank line for your name.

~ two were sold, one was switched off ~

The fates of the three big Japanese servers diverged completely. mstdn.jp changed hands three times between October 2018 and June 2020 and ended up owned by a US company. It is still up. Pawoo was handed to Cross Gate in December 2019 and to The Social Coop in December 2022, and it is still up too. Dwango sold nothing and closed its server instead, which leaves friends.nico as the single member of that trio carrying an actual death date.

Nothing official was offered in its place. The instruction was to export your own data in ActivityPub format and go find another server yourself. What appeared instead came from the people who had been running the thing: on 10 April 2019, eighteen days before the end, two of friends.nico's own operators opened Best Friends as a catch-basin for whoever wanted to land somewhere together. It is still running now, on Mastodon 4.1, with about 3,100 accounts and 12.6 million posts. The lifeboat has now been afloat more than three times as long as the ship was.

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