Mojvideo

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

~ the last words ~

Slovenian is spoken by about two million people, which sets a hard ceiling on any website written in it, and the way past that ceiling is usually the neighbors. Mojvideo had a Croatian edition and by its own count was drawing more than a million visitors a month from outside the country against a hundred thousand inside it. Turkish sites of the same era had no equivalent move available to them, because there is no second country next door reading the same language, so a Turkish video portal was as big as Turkey and no bigger. Two different ceilings, and the Slovenian one turned out to be higher.

The portal opened in November 2006, a year after YouTube's official launch and while the argument over who would host the world's home video was still open. It was run by Popcom d.o.o. out of Slovenia, free and paid for by advertising, and it was more of a community site than a video host. Members uploaded video and pictures and argued in the comments under eighteen categories running from hidden camera and cartoons through animals and cooking. There was a friends list and a private message box too, because that was what a portal meant in 2006. The about page counted 174,656 registered members and more than 30,000 followers on Facebook.

In early 2023 the front page grew a notice in place of the usual featured clip. The owners wrote that for business reasons they had decided to switch off the mojvideo.com portal, that it would go dark on 31 March, that they were sorry for any inconvenience and grateful for the loyalty, and that users should save anything they wanted to keep onto their own computers as soon as possible, because after the shutdown that content would be inaccessible. The last capture of a working front page is dated 28 March 2023.

~ the record ~

~ what the last page showed ~

The final front page is a document about how a community site ends. The featured clips are thirty-second phone videos with view counts in the hundreds, most of them in Serbian or Croatian rather than Slovenian, and a handful of usernames appear over and over down the column. One account had posted both the animal clip and the late-night good-night message, a few hours apart.

That is what the traffic split had turned into by the end. A portal built for Slovenia was being kept warm mostly by regulars from the rest of the former Yugoslavia, who had found it through the Croatian edition and stayed.

What it was really hosting in 2023 was a small set of people who had been talking to each other on the same website since their thirties. The videos were the excuse.

~ save it before friday ~

The notice is more honest than most shutdown announcements, and that is exactly what makes it hard reading. There was no export tool, no archive handoff, no partner site taking the library. There was an instruction to download your own material onto your own machine, and a date.

Sixteen years of uploads from a community of that size is not a thing an individual can rescue by clicking through their own profile in a week, and most people were never going to see the banner at all, because most members of any site that old stopped visiting years before it closed. Whatever nobody personally pulled down in March 2023 is gone, minus whatever the Wayback Machine happened to have crawled.

~ the nameservers still answer ~

The domain is registered until 21 July 2027 and still delegated to three nameservers at a Slovenian host. Ask them for the address of the site and they reply correctly and politely with a start-of-authority record and no address at all, which is the DNS way of saying the name is still owned and there is nothing behind it.

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