pixiv Chat

» see chat.pixiv.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A pixiv Chat room stayed public for one hour. That was the rule when it launched on 15 December 2009, and it shaped everything about how the service felt. Starting a room required a paid pixiv Premium account, but once the room existed, anyone on pixiv could walk in and put marks on the same canvas you were working on. An hour is short enough that nobody treats the result as a portfolio piece. People came in, scribbled over whatever was already there, and the room closed on a picture that four strangers had touched.

The word for this in Japanese is oekaki, and it predates pixiv by about a decade. Oekaki boards ran on Shi-Painter and PaintBBS applets bolted onto personal sites and image boards through the late nineties, and the culture of drawing badly in public with other people came out of them. pixiv had launched in September 2007 as a place to post finished illustrations and became the center of gravity for Japanese illustrators almost immediately. Chat was the company admitting that the unfinished part mattered too.

Under the hood it was Flash all the way down. The canvas was not stored as an image. It was stored as a stream of AMF packets, the serialization format Flash used for structured data, holding the raw brushstrokes in the order they were made. A finished room could therefore be replayed, and you could sit and watch a drawing assemble itself at the speed somebody actually drew it. It also meant that when the service died, the drawings died in a format almost nothing else could open.

pixiv announced the closure for noon JST on Thursday 15 June 2017 and told users plainly that anything they had posted would only be available until that moment. If you wanted the images off your room pages, you had to go and get them yourself. The replacement, the notice said, would be a function inside pixiv Sketch that let many creators draw together in real time.

~ the dossier ~

~ the distance ~

Getting into a pixiv Chat room in 2009 meant paying for a subscription to a site whose interface carried almost no English for years, and then reading enough Japanese to follow the text column while you drew. I had neither. The nearest thing in my part of the internet was the generation of Java paint applets that turned up on forums everywhere, Turkish boards included, where the drawing was a toy bolted onto the forum software. pixiv Chat came from people who had already decided the scribble was the content.

~ one hour per room ~

Room creation sitting behind pixiv Premium explains the scale. Nobody ever bragged about a user count here, because the population was the paying subset of an already specialized community, plus whoever they dragged in as guests. Access could be locked to friends or put behind a password, and the room list showed you who was inside before you walked through the door.

Rooms were numbered sequentially from one, which is how Archive Team eventually walked the whole thing. Increment the room ID, pad it to nine digits, split it into thirds to find the directory path on the image servers, then ask the API for the byte ranges of the AMF files. No public list of rooms ever existed, so the URL scheme had to serve as one.

~ what the archive got ~

The grab ran under the savepixiv channel and what came back sits in the Internet Archive's 2017 pixiv collection. It is the packet logs and the thumbnails, which is to say the instructions for drawings rather than the drawings themselves. Playing them back needs something that still speaks AMF and understands what a pixiv Chat brush was, and Flash was switched off worldwide three and a half years after the service closed.

~ the inheritance ~

pixiv Sketch shipped in 2017 and its collaborative half became pixiv Sketch LIVE, the thing the closure notice had promised. It lasted about as long as its parent. ITmedia ran the obituary on 23 June 2025, and Sketch LIVE went off at 15:00 JST on 27 August 2025 after eight years, taking the pixiv Points currency with it. pixiv Sketch itself is still running, so only the drawing-together part has now been retired twice.

Today chat.pixiv.net answers with a 410, the status code reserved for things that were here and are deliberately gone, and sends you to a page explaining that LIVE has closed.

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