Gulli.com

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

~ the obit ~

the download link era reached turkey without any trouble. the german forum where those links were argued about did not. gulli was a german-language site for a german-speaking audience, and that is most of the distance between us. i know the shape of what it was because every country with a fast enough connection grew one.

randolf jorberg started it in 1998, when he was still a teenager, close enough to the copying scene that the early years were spent moving between addresses because of what people were posting. it settled into something more durable than that: a daily news site about file sharing and computer security, plus whatever the record industry's lawyers were doing that week. the reporting was real reporting. the forum underneath it grew past a million registered accounts and became one of the biggest german-language boards on the web.

jorberg sold the site in february 2008 to inqnet gmbh in vienna. in july 2013 it changed hands again, to gamigo, a hamburg games company that had been buying up web properties. a scene news portal owned by a browser games publisher is already an odd arrangement, and it is roughly the point where anyone reading the trajectory could see the ending.

on 25 may 2018 gamigo's advertising arm turned gulli off. no notice to the users, no archive export, no goodbye post. the date was not random: it was the day the gdpr became enforceable across europe, and a twenty-year forum full of pseudonymous posts about copyright infringement is exactly the kind of database you either invest in or delete. they deleted it and listed the domain for sale.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the board ~

the front page was news, but the forum was the reason people stayed. it ran on the standard german board culture of the period, which meant long threads and users who had been posting under the same handle since school. by the end it held around 1.4 million accounts and something close to two decades of discussion about how the internet was being policed.

that archive is the loss. german debates about surveillance law and filesharing prosecutions happened on boards like this one before they happened anywhere a journalist would look. it existed as a searchable public record right up until it did not.

~ the day it died ~

the gdpr angle is the part worth keeping. the regulation was written to give people control over data held about them, and one of its side effects was to make old user databases a liability rather than an asset. any site with millions of dormant accounts and no plan for handling them had a decision to make by 25 may 2018. plenty of small european sites shut down that week rather than do the work.

gulli was not small. it was the largest site of its kind in a country of eighty million people, and its owner ran the numbers and switched off the servers on the deadline itself.

~ the long tail ~

jorberg bought his own site back from gamigo later that year, including the 1.4 million accounts and the forum history, and in september 2018 he put up a page saying gulli was coming home. the plan he described was a privacy toolkit rather than a forum, ad-free, funded by users instead of advertisers.

that page is still there in 2026. same promise, same wordpress theme, no forum. the domain is alive and the site is not, which is its own kind of headstone.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »