Multimania

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

~ the obit ~

Multimania was a french free web hosting service from 1997 to 2003. The model was the same as GeoCities. You signed up for an account, you got a small amount of disk space and a subdomain like membres.multimania.com/yourname, and you could put up whatever pages you wanted. In exchange, the service put an ad banner at the top of every page you hosted.

This is a french thing i never used. In turkey we mostly used GeoCities or local turkish free hosting from 1999 onwards. Multimania did not show up in turkey at all. But every french person who built a personal homepage as a teenager in the late 1990s probably hosted it on multimania, and the cultural memory of it is similar to how americans remember GeoCities.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually hosted ~

Personal homepages, mostly. Pages about a kid's favorite band. Fan sites for tv shows or video games. Class projects. Local soccer team news pages. The same stuff GeoCities had, but in french, with french music tastes and french tv references and french regional concerns.

Some pages were elaborate. Multimania users put up wallpapers, animated gifs, midi music, frame layouts, guestbooks, hit counters, the whole 1990s personal-page kit. There was a small subculture of webmaster competitions and webrings within multimania, with awards for best site of the month in different categories.

Other pages were just placeholders. Someone signed up for an account, made one page that said "ma page perso" with two photos and an email address, and never updated it. The site had millions of these abandoned pages.

~ the lycos era ~

Lycos bought multimania in 2000. By that point lycos was running a similar service called tripod, which was the european GeoCities equivalent. The plan was to merge multimania users into tripod's french version.

The merger was rough. Some features were lost. Some pages were broken in the migration. The community that had grown up around multimania did not really survive into the new tripod-france brand. People kept their domains for a while but the energy was gone.

Lycos's whole european presence was in trouble through the early 2000s. They had bought too many local services and had no real plan for them. Multimania was one of the casualties of that strategy.

~ how it died ~

The actual brand multimania was retired in 2003. The hosted pages were migrated to lycos europe servers. Some pages survived. Many did not. By 2005 most of what had been multimania was just a folder on a lycos server somewhere.

Lycos europe itself collapsed a few years later. The french hosted pages mostly vanished in the various ownership changes. By 2010, almost no original multimania pages were still online with their original urls.

The web archive has snapshots of some of them. Going through old multimania pages on the wayback machine is one of those small archeological pleasures. The graphics, the choices people made about font colors, the auto-playing midi files. It is a specific aesthetic that french teenagers in 1999 produced collectively, and it does not exist anywhere else now.

~ what we lost ~

The same thing we lost when GeoCities went down. A whole layer of personal expression that did not have a recognizable structure. People made pages because they wanted to make a page. The pages did not have to be cool, did not have to attract followers, did not have to fit a platform's content rules. They just existed.

The french version of this had its own flavor. The graphic design was a little more restrained. The color choices were sometimes better. The web rings tended to be more focused. But the basic loss is the same. Free hosting plus a banner ad in exchange has not really come back as a model. Modern free hosting is more locked down, more polished, more managed.