Idka

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

~ the obit ~

Idka was a Swedish attempt to sell the thing every other social network gave away, which is to say the absence of advertising. You got a news feed and encrypted chat, notes and contact circles, groups that could be open or hidden, with cloud storage attached to all of it. The company registered the phrase "be social, stay private" and treated it as a business model instead of a slogan: no advertising anywhere on the platform, and a monthly fee to pay for its absence. It was aimed at individuals and at organizations at the same time, which meant it was competing with Facebook and with Slack in the same breath.

The founders came to this late in their careers. Göran Wågström had spent twenty years at Ericsson and run its German arm, then served as chief executive of a listed consultancy. Bjørn Stormorken came from Amnesty International and the Council of Europe's human rights directorate by way of a partnership at Pareto Securities. They raised twenty million kronor from around ten investors, the best known of them Hans Mellström, a co-founder of WM-data, and they spent a couple of years building before anyone outside saw it.

The invite-only beta opened in December 2016 with a waiting list. Swedish tech press covered it kindly and a reporter at Feber noted it took about a day to get let in. Signup went open at some point before late 2018. Beyond that, the public record of who actually used this thing is empty. No user figure appears anywhere on the company's own pages, and none appears in the Swedish press coverage either, from the beta through to the farewell.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ two gigabytes free ~

The published price list was modest to the point of self-effacement. A personal account got two gigabytes of storage for nothing. Twenty gigabytes cost two euros a month, and a business seat with a terabyte behind it ran to five euros per user per month. Non-profits were told a price would be worked out according to how they used it.

The interesting part is further down the same page. The payment terms document that lists those tiers also says, in its own words, that credit card subscription billing for personal accounts was "planned for this year" and that the terms "represent the current plan" and "will be implemented" barring a change of strategy. That text was still sitting on the site in June 2020, two months after the farewell went up. Idka spent three and a half years building a paid alternative to advertising, and it never charged a personal subscriber anything.

~ the trial button ~

The farewell went up on 21 April 2020 under the heading of an important announcement, and it is an unusually honest piece of writing for the genre. It said the board had decided to tell members that the service "may discontinue at any time" and that they should treat downloading their uploaded material as a priority. It closed on a line about holding on to the light of hope that Idka would rise again. Then nothing was ever added to it. The page sat there for at least nine more months, and when the January 2021 capture is diffed against the May 2020 one, not a single line has changed.

What makes it strange is the page next door. All through that period the home page carried the farewell in its top navigation, labeled with an asterisk, sitting a few pixels away from a button that said Start Free Trial Now. On Christmas Day 2020, eight months after the company had told its members to get their files out, the front door was still taking signups. The site finally went dark some time between 20 January and 28 September 2021, and what proves it is the server header: the real site ran nginx 1.15.8, while the thing standing there afterward answers to a parking server.

~ the bridge round ~

The stated cause of death is in the notice and it is two things. The first is that the user base never grew fast enough despite what the company called growing enthusiasm for privacy and the ethical use of technology. The second is that COVID-19 arrived while they were raising. Signs had been positive that growth capital would come from one or more new funds, the notice says, but they could not secure the bridge financing needed to get them through the crisis. A company with no advertising revenue and no personal subscriptions live had exactly one source of money, and in the spring of 2020 that source closed for everybody at once.

idka.com is now a Sedo parking page offering itself for sale, and idka.se is an empty placeholder at a Swedish host. The apps are delisted. Searching the iOS store for Idka today returns a Danish gym loyalty app and a Slovak hotel, neither of them connected to this story in any way. There is no pivot and no successor, and the usual way of writing about a dead social network, which is to find the people who miss it, does not work here, because nobody ever said how many of them there were.

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