Mixi

» see mixi.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

mixi launched in february 2004 from a tokyo company founded by kenji kasahara. it was invitation-only from the start. you needed a friend already on the network to let you in. the core product was a diary page where you posted short text entries about your day. visitors left ashiato, japanese for foot-marks, a small log on your profile showing which friends had stopped by. communities formed around hobbies. people kept their real names off it and used handle nicknames instead.

the network grew very fast through the late 2000s. by 2005 it had passed a million users. by july 2010 it reported over 30 million users in a country of about 127 million people. for a window of around three years it was simply the social network in japan, in the same way that cyworld was the social network in korea over a similar period. facebook barely registered there. twitter was bigger in japan than in many other markets but still ran beside mixi rather than over it.

mixi never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a japan-market product with a japan-only feel from the visual design through to the writing conventions. i learned about it years later from western tech writers describing how japan had run on its own social network for almost a decade. for non-japanese readers it was the kind of product you only heard about because it ran on a different rail entirely from the platforms you actually used. another parallel social internet that the english-speaking web mostly ignored in real time.

~ the dossier ~

~ the curtain ~

the smartphone happened. mixi was built for the japanese feature-phone web of the mid-2000s, an environment where everyone read short text on a small screen with a numeric keypad. when iphone and android took over japan after 2010, mixi felt heavy and slow on the new devices. line launched in 2011 as a free messaging app and rapidly became the default communication layer for japanese users. twitter took the public broadcast role beside it.

the user numbers fell hard. mixi reported over 30 million users in 2010 and around 14 million monthly active users by september 2012. the diary page format that had worked when most users were sitting at home posting from a feature phone in the evening did not survive the move to constant mobile messaging. mixi tried to reposition itself, opened up registration, added smartphone clients, but the network effect was already gone.

the parent company found a different way out. mixi inc. pivoted into mobile games and produced monster strike, a tap-and-slash game that became a top-grossing title in japan for years. the company itself stayed profitable. the original social network kept running in the background as a kind of legacy archive. in december 2024 mixi inc. launched mixi2, a separate invitation-only short-text app, framed as a return to the social side of the brand for the post-twitter age.

~ what it left ~

the foot-mark feature. ashiato logging visits to your profile is something almost no western network ever shipped at scale. the closest equivalents are linkedin's "who viewed your profile" or the read-receipt indicators in messaging apps. mixi made it the central social signal of the product. you knew who had been by. they knew you knew. it created a layer of low-pressure contact that felt very different from the like button era that came after.

the proof that a national social internet could stay national. the standard tech-press story of social networks in the late 2000s assumed facebook would absorb every market that was not china. korea ran on cyworld until kakaotalk took it. japan ran on mixi until line took it. neither country went directly to facebook. the assumption that "global" meant "facebook" turned out to be wrong about half of east asia for a very long time.

the invitation rule as a memory anchor. for years getting on mixi meant asking a friend already inside. people remember the first invite they sent and received. when the network finally opened registration in late 2010 it was treated in japan as a small end-of-era event. by then it was already too late.

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