MLKSHK

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

~ the obituary ~

mlkshk was a small image-sharing site, launched in 2010 by amber costley and andre torrez. the name was pronounced milkshake. it ran until may 1 2017, when the founders shut it down after a long and quiet decline. before that final closure they had already tried to shut it down once, in may 2014, and were talked out of it by the users. they reversed the decision and kept the lights on for almost three more years.

the model was small on purpose. you signed up, you posted images and short videos by dragging them into the browser, you grouped them into topic boards called "shakes" with a small set of friends or strangers, you commented with reaction images. there was a free tier and a paid pro tier. the pro tier was what kept the site alive, not advertising, not venture money. for the period it ran, mlkshk was one of the only consumer image sites in the post-tumblr era that paid for itself through subscriptions instead of ad pixels.

this site sat in the part of the english-language indie web i could read about at the time but had no real foothold in. by the early 2010s i was deep into engineering work and the indie us-coastal microblog scene was something i followed at distance through hacker news and the occasional waxy.org post. the mlkshk community was overwhelmingly american and overwhelmingly designer-and-developer-twitter. the cultural artifact was a specific tone of internet humor that did not transit cleanly through other languages or networks.

~ the case file ~

~ what really happened ~

in february 2017 andre torrez posted on the blog that they were closing. they gave about ten weeks of notice. they offered every user a zip export of all their images and a backup tool. they reached out to archive team, which pulled down close to two terabytes of images and metadata before the servers went off. on may 1 2017 the front page turned into a goodbye message and the database froze.

the same month, a group of users formed a nonprofit cooperative called mltshp, raised over three thousand dollars in a fund drive, then asked the founders for the code. amber and andre handed over the codebase and the anonymized database and the assets, free of charge. mltshp open-sourced the code on github and restored a private beta, then let former users opt in to transition their accounts. it has been running quietly ever since.

~ what replaced it ~

the mlkshk-mltshp handoff is one of the cleanest community-revival cases in the dead-website ledger. the founders did not ghost. they wrote a real goodbye, they shipped exports, they gave the assets away free. the community took the code and ran it themselves on a budget.

this is not how shutdowns usually go. compare against pownce, vox, posterous, app.net. those were higher-profile sites with venture money that flamed out and left users with broken links and a forwarding redirect to a corporate page. mlkshk was smaller than any of them and exited with more dignity than all of them combined.

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