Lokalisten

» see lokalisten.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Lokalisten was a munich-rooted social network that ran from may 2005 until september 30, 2016. it was started by five friends in their early twenties, scaled to about 300,000 users in its first year, and became the dominant social platform for bavaria and parts of austria during the period that studivz held the rest of germany. in 2008 the prosiebensat.1 broadcasting group bought it for about 25 million euros, and that purchase is the date everything stops being a friend-network founder story and becomes a corporate-asset story.

at peak in 2010 lokalisten had around two million active users. by 2011 the number was already well under one million. facebook had crossed into germany and the network advantage that local platforms relied on, where everyone you knew was already on the platform, flipped the other way inside about eighteen months. the broadcaster watched the asset depreciate without a serious counter-strategy for years.

lokalisten was germany-only at the cultural layer. it was also munich-specific in a way that mattered: the founding team was bavarian, the early user concentration was bavarian, the events feature was tuned to munich nightlife. i had no path to it. by 2010 i was on facebook like most of the people i knew in turkey, msn was still open in the background, and german-language regional socials sat behind the same language wall as the rest of the dach-region internet.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the prosiebensat.1 acquisition in 2008 made sense at the time. broadcasters across europe were trying to figure out what to do about the social internet, the german-language audience seemed defensible, and twenty-five million euros for an asset with two million users was not unreasonable in the period when facebook was still uncertain in europe. studivz had just been bought by holtzbrinck for one hundred million. lokalisten looked like the safer bet on the bavarian side of the country.

~ how it actually ended ~

by june 2016 lokalisten was at about 50,000 active users. on august 31, 2016 the company informed all registered accounts of the planned shutdown, and the announcement triggered a small rush of about 600,000 dormant accounts logging in one final time to save photos and messages. the actual shutoff was september 30, 2016. there was no last-minute pivot, no buyer, no sell-off of the technology to anybody. prosiebensat.1 had already written off the asset internally years before; closing it was just cleanup.

~ what came after ~

lokalisten is the bavarian half of a story that includes studivz, wer-kennt-wen, and a couple of smaller german-language socials, all of which were beaten by facebook over the same five-year window. the part that is specific to lokalisten is the founder buyback that did not happen. the original five founders left the company over the years after the prosiebensat.1 sale, and by the time the network was clearly dying nobody had the leverage or the appetite to take it back. it died as a broadcaster's spreadsheet line rather than as a community.

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