Mygale

» see mygale.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Mygale was one of the very first free web hosting services in france. It started in october 1995 as a small project by a student named valentin lacambre. The whole point was that anyone in france with something to put on the web could get a place to host it without paying. There were no ads. There was no business plan. It was a volunteer-run service.

For a few years, mygale was where most of the early personal french web lived. By 1998 there were tens of thousands of pages on it. Some were political. Some were art projects. Some were just personal homepages. The technical infrastructure was tiny by modern standards but it served a real need at a moment when free hosting was rare.

This is another french thing i did not directly experience. Turkey in 1995 had almost no commercial internet at all. The few of us online were mostly using university accounts or BBSes. Mygale would have been completely outside the turkish information space. I learned about it years later through articles about the early french web.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what made it different ~

Two things. The volunteer model and the politics.

The volunteer model meant that mygale was free in a way that multimania, even with its banner ads, was not. Lacambre paid for the servers himself early on. Donations from users kept things going. There were no banner ads. There were no commercial considerations.

The politics meant that lacambre cared about who could host things. Mygale tended to host political and activist content that big commercial services would have banned. Anti-corporate sites, satirical pages, regional independence groups, smaller religious communities, strange artistic projects. Mygale was the place where the weird french web lived.

~ the lawsuits ~

This independence got lacambre into legal trouble. He hosted pages that some powerful people did not like. There were lawsuits. There was political pressure. In 1996 he was sued for hosting a satirical site that had upset a french politician. Other cases followed.

The legal questions were the early version of what would later be called platform liability. Was the host responsible for what users put up? French law was unclear at the time. Lacambre was not a corporation with lawyers on staff. He was a guy running a service from his apartment.

The pressure made running the service harder and more expensive. By 1998 lacambre had moved mygale into a bigger non-profit structure called altern.org, which still operated under the same volunteer principles but had legal protection.

~ how it died ~

Multimania bought altern in 1999 or 2000, depending on how you count. The exact details of the deal are not well documented online. What is clear is that the original mygale brand was retired around that time. The user pages were migrated to multimania's commercial hosting. The volunteer ethos did not survive the migration.

Lacambre himself moved on to other projects. He has stayed loosely involved in french internet politics ever since. He is one of those people who shows up in articles about the early french web as a small but real founding figure.

~ what is left ~

Mygale is the kind of project that history mostly forgets. It was not a billion-dollar company. It did not get bought for a famous price. It just ran for five years, hosted a lot of weird and independent pages, and then was absorbed into something more commercial.

But the early french web depended on mygale being there. A bunch of cultural and political content from 1995 to 1999 only existed because lacambre was willing to host it. The web archive has fragments of some of those pages. Looking at them now is like looking at fossils. The french internet of the mid-1990s was strange, political, and made by hand. Mygale was the soil it grew in.