MihanBlog

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

~ the eulogy ~

I cannot read a word of Persian, so everything here is reconstruction. What I can read is the shape, because it is the same shape everywhere. A free host, a signup form, a template you barely customize, and then years of somebody's actual life going into a box on a server owned by a stranger.

MihanBlog opened on 17 November 2004, founded by Mohammad Javad Shokouri Moghadam, and became one of the main places Iranians wrote in public. This matters more there than it sounds. The Persian blogosphere in the 2000s was one of the busiest anywhere in the world, in a language with maybe eighty million speakers, and it stayed busy long after English-language blogging had migrated to social platforms. When the platforms that ate blogging elsewhere kept getting blocked inside Iran, the blogs simply carried on.

So the hosts mattered. Blogfa and PersianBlog were the other big ones, and MihanBlog sat alongside them with hit counters and a little shop feature bolted on for people who wanted to sell something. In 2014 alone it took on more than 155,000 new blogs. That is not a niche service. That is a national utility that happened to be owned by a private individual.

~ the dossier ~

~ what got buried with it ~

Sixteen years of a country writing about itself. Not the political material, mostly, which is what outsiders always assume Iranian blogging was about. The bulk of it was what the bulk of blogging is anywhere: recipes, exam results, grief and long entries about a job somebody hated in 2009.

None of that gets rescued, because nobody rescues the ordinary. When a famous site dies, an archive team shows up. When a free host with hundreds of thousands of small blogs dies, the people who could have saved it are the writers themselves, and most of them stopped logging in years earlier and never saw the notice.

~ what really happened ~

On 6 December 2020 a notice went up over the name of Alireza Hosseini, who was running the service by then. The site's software had aged out and there was no sufficient reason to reinvest in new servers or new development. Keeping watch over the content of the blogs and their comments had become difficult, which in that jurisdiction is not an abstract complaint, since the host is the one who answers for what is posted.

The deadline was fifteen days. On 21 December 2020 the servers went off. Every link into MihanBlog that anyone had ever posted anywhere broke at the same moment, which is what sixteen years of a free host looks like on the way out.

The honest reading of that notice is that it was a maintenance decision. Somebody looked at an old codebase, an old hardware bill and a moderation burden that only grows, and concluded that the reasonable thing was to switch it off. He was probably right about his own position. It is just that the cost of being right landed on several hundred thousand people who were never asked.

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