Ghostbin

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

~ the eulogy ~

Ghostbin was a pastebin. You dropped text into a box, it handed back a URL, and the person on the other end of the chat could read your stack trace without you flooding the channel with forty lines of Java. Ghostbin's version had an expiry clock and client-side encryption, the second one triggered by typing a password into the box next to the text area.

It was written by Dustin Howett, better known since as one of the people behind Windows Terminal at Microsoft. He first put it up in 2013. The earliest capture the Wayback Machine holds of ghostbin.com is from 2 June 2013 and the whole page is a single kilobyte, which is about right for a tool whose entire interface is a text area and a button.

In December 2018 he said on Twitter that the site would be shutting down or changing drastically in February. February came and went. Sometime between 17 April and 3 May 2019 a notice appeared on the front page saying May instead. What actually happened was slower than any of the announcements: read-only on 6 June, still serving the old pastes through the summer, and then nothing after late August.

~ the dossier ~

~ 644,000 pastes ~

On 27 December 2018 Howett counted roughly 644,000 pastes on the service. Against Pastebin that is nothing. For something one person maintained next to a full-time job it is a lot of other people's text to be responsible for, and the counting was the first sign he had started thinking of it as a weight rather than a hobby.

A pastebin is the least sentimental software there is. You use it to move a log file from one machine into a chat window and you never open the link again. I have put more text through pastebins over the years than I have put into anything I would call writing, and I could not name a single paste I made or say which service it went to. Six hundred and forty-four thousand of those throwaway links were still sitting there when the owner decided to count them.

~ what happened to the name ~

The code outlived the service. Howett kept the source on GitHub, and during the wind-down he renamed the repository from ghostbin to spectre, specifically so that people running their own copy would not be running something branded after a site he no longer wanted to operate. The last push was 14 May 2019. He archived the repository on 6 September 2022. It still carries 188 stars and the description field is still nothing but the URL of a site that has not been his in years.

ghostbin.com came back in September 2020 under somebody else, with different code and none of the old pastes. That version did not last either. The domain answers today with a redirect to pst.klgrth.io, a pastebin operating under an entirely different name, so the Ghostbin brand has now been retired twice by two unrelated people. Meanwhile ghostbin.co serves a working Spectre install to anyone who wants one, which is the open-source ending: the software survives everywhere except the address it was written for.

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