Manjam

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

~ the obituary ~

Manjam ran in twenty-eight languages and Turkish was one of them. I had no reason to open it and did not know the name until I went looking for what was missing from this list. The people who did have a reason were using a different internet than mine, in the same country and the same language, and that is most of what needs saying about how much of the web any one person actually sees.

Hubjet Limited launched it from London in October 2004 as a social network for gay and bisexual men, with location search on top. Its founders described the aim as giving people in countries where same-sex relationships are criminalized somewhere to connect without prejudice. The site carried listings for accommodation and business next to the personal profiles, so a screen of it did not necessarily read as what it was.

More than two million accounts registered over its life, about a million of those in Europe. The traffic that mattered was elsewhere. Alexa put Manjam's visibility highest in Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon and Qatar, and a survey of gay Iraqis by Michael Luongo, published in a 2010 academic volume on Islam and homosexuality, found it was among the most used sites for making social contact at all. That same reach cut the other way: the region's police and militias knew the site as well as its users did, and entrapment through gay networking sites was being reported in the Gulf and the Levant through the 2010s.

~ the case file ~

~ built to be deniable ~

Manjam was a web application and never a native app, and by the 2010s that was a deliberate safety decision rather than a technical shortcut. It was built on HTML5 and CSS3, ran inside the phone's browser, and required nothing to be installed. Grindr had launched in 2009 and put an icon on your home screen. In a country where a police officer can ask you to unlock your phone, an icon is evidence and a closed browser tab is not.

The localization work went the same way. Manjam was the first gay social web application built for right-to-left languages, shipping in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Urdu. Nobody does that work for market size. There is no advertising revenue in Tehran.

~ the actual end ~

It did not end so much as stop. Sometime in 2016 the site went offline, with no announcement and no acquirer, no notice to two million accounts and no press coverage of any of it. Wikipedia's entry gives the whole thing one sentence. The domain answers nothing now.

For most dead websites a silent exit is rude. For this one it meant a user base with every reason not to keep copies of anything lost its contacts and its way of finding people, with no warning and nobody to ask. The services that took the traffic were the installed apps Manjam had spent a decade routing around.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »