Lurkmore

» see lurkmore.to as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Lurkmore was region-locked at the language layer, which is a harder wall than any firewall. Everything on it was written in Russian, and not the Russian you can machine-translate, but layered imageboard slang whose entire value was in the register it was written in. Runet in those years ran a parallel internet with its own portals and its own memes, and Lurkmore was the encyclopedia of that world. I have read about it. I could never have read it.

David Homak launched it on 30 July 2007 as a MediaWiki install documenting the culture of 2ch.ru, the Russian imageboard, and it expanded outward from there into a general reference for Runet subculture. The writing style was the product. Articles were sarcastic, profane and openly partisan, describing memes in the voice of the people who made them rather than in the flat tone of an encyclopedia, which made it enormously readable and completely unusable as a citation.

That tone is also what put it on the wrong side of the Russian state. A site that documents everything an internet actually talks about will inevitably document the parts a government would prefer went unindexed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the decline ~

On 11 November 2012, Roskomnadzor blacklisted the site's IP address over two articles about marijuana. The block came off three days later once the administrators removed the offending pages, and in the meantime the traffic went up, since being banned by the state is excellent publicity for a site whose readership is composed largely of people who dislike the state.

The 2012 block was a warning rather than an ending. The pressure kept building, and in 2015 Homak announced the project was going into conservation mode: preserved as a cultural artifact but no longer actively developed, because he could not keep running it under the level of attention it was getting from Roskomnadzor and law enforcement. He left Russia afterwards. For seven years the site stayed up as an archive of a thing that had stopped growing.

~ what it became ~

On 24 February 2022, the day Russian forces crossed into Ukraine, the whole site went black. Every page returned the same blank screen. Later the phrase остановите войну, stop the war, was added at the top in blue and yellow.

It is a strange thing for a memorial to a decade of jokes to end as a protest banner, and it is the only ending that would have been in character. The site had spent fifteen years refusing to pretend, and its last edit was the same gesture at a larger scale. Nothing has been restored.

~ the next chapter ~

Most of the content was rescued and reuploaded at neolurk.org by people who wanted the archive to survive the gesture that ended the original. The fork exists and is maintained, and if you want to read what Lurkmore said about any given meme from 2009, you can.

What did not survive is the position. Lurkmore mattered because it was the single place the Russian-speaking internet had agreed to write itself down in, and an agreement like that does not transfer with the database. A mirror keeps the text. The consensus that made the text worth having is not a file you can copy.

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