OUTeverywhere

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

~ the last words ~

OUTeverywhere was a British gay social network that opened in 1995 under the name OUTintheUK, which tells you exactly how much of the world it was built for. It was a site for gay men in Britain, and later for everybody else under the OUT name, and its whole working life happened inside one country's scene. I have no connection to it at all. In 1995 I was eleven years old in Ankara and three years away from my first modem, and even once I was online the British gay internet was not somewhere my dial-up went.

What it did was ordinary and, for its era, quite hard. Members had profiles with picture galleries and online chat, plus discussion boards that only paying members could use. Nude profile photos were not allowed and soliciting for sex was stopped, which in a category that went almost entirely the other way was a choice with consequences. The site was for gay men at first. OUTforWomen launched in 2003, and in May 2005 the whole thing relaunched under the OUTeverywhere name.

The relaunch nearly took a different name. The company behind it was called Up and Doing Ltd, and the plan was to move the site to that name too, until long-standing members complained enough that the plan was dropped. The company kept trading as Up and Doing while the site went out as OUTeverywhere. Companies House has the rest: incorporated 9 December 2004 as Up and Doing Limited, renamed OUTEVERYWHERE LIMITED in April 2005, and dissolved on 20 March 2012 as a dormant company, with its last accounts made up to the end of 2009. The website carried on for another seven years after the paperwork stopped.

~ the record ~

~ what it was actually for ~

The thing worth saving here is the offline half. OUT ran events, and not the sort of events a dating app runs: coffee outings and cocktail outings, day trips and sporting fixtures, murder mystery weekends and camping and bowling, and at least once, cheese rolling. The site existed so that people would arrange to be somewhere together, and the profile was the means rather than the end.

The clearest proof of what the operators thought they were running came in 2006, during a programme addressing concerns about a cyberstalker. They contacted 30,000 members who had never taken part in any of the planned social events. A dating site would have no reason to know that number, let alone to act on it.

~ the ending it announced first ~

In October 2017 OUT announced that the website would close on 31 October 2018. That date came and went and the site kept running. It finally closed more than a year later, in December 2019, and nobody ever published an exact day for it or gave a reason.

The Wikipedia article says December. The site's own farewell page says only that it closed at the end of 2019, which is as precise as the record gets. Between the announced ending and the real one there are fourteen months that nobody has written down.

~ the page that is still up ~

outeverywhere.com answers today. It serves two kilobytes under its original title, with the logo still loading from the same path it always did, and a heading that reads "OUTeverywhere and OUTintheUK. 1995-2019." Underneath: "OUT is now closed. It is no longer possible to login."

The page then recommends Gmeet, a community interest company building an LGBT+ social network, which was still marked "In Development" when I looked. Gmeet does not name its operator anywhere on its own site, so whether this is the same people starting again or a parting recommendation to strangers is not something the public record answers. Either way, somebody has been paying to keep a goodbye online for six years, which is more than most dead websites get.

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