Poema.pl

» see poema.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Poema.pl was a place where Polish people posted poems. It ran from 2000 under two addresses, poema.pl and poema.art.pl, and it had the structure these sites always converge on: a stream of published pieces with a comment thread under each one, and a forum where everybody argued about them. The numbering gives you the scale better than any description. Poems were addressed by sequential ID, and the highest anybody has managed to find is 220,349, dated around 21 March 2017.

The ending was announced far in advance and then executed very slowly. At 21:56 on 31 March 2017 the operator posted in the site's own forum to say that, as previously warned, he had just disabled logins. If you got an incorrect-password message, he wrote, that was not a bug. In the same post he pointed everybody at poemax.pl, which offered similar functionality and where most of Poema's active users had already moved.

From that evening Poema was readable and frozen. A notice on every page explained that the shutdown had begun and that logins had been blocked at the end of March 2017. The service, it said, would close around October 2017. It asked people to save their own work before the date, because afterward there would be no way to do it. The signature at the bottom is Arkadiusz Kuryłowicz.

October 2017 came and went and the site was still standing. The real end was 4 April 2018, when the front page turned into a farewell. It said that Poema.pl and Poema.art.pl had ceased operation after eighteen years. Personal data attached to accounts had been deleted, and so had everything users had published. Underneath the text somebody had embedded a music video, "Filandia" by Świetliki, a Kraków band whose singer is himself a poet. Ten days later the site stopped loading correctly at all.

~ the dossier ~

~ the deletion ~

Most sites in this archive died by neglect or by acquisition, and in both of those cases the content tends to sit on a disk somewhere until the disk gets reused for something else. Poema is different because the deletion was deliberate and announced twice. The farewell does not tell you the site is going away. It tells you your work has been erased.

The framing is privacy law, written the way a careful operator wrote things in the spring of 2018. GDPR came into force on 25 May that year, seven weeks after the notice went up, and the language of the farewell is the language of a data controller closing a dataset: processing has ended, personal data associated with your account has been deleted. Applied to eighteen years of amateur poetry, it reads as something well beyond compliance.

~ a language i do not have ~

I do not read Polish, so Poema is a site I can describe and cannot judge. What I can recognize is the type. Every language's internet grew one of these in roughly the same years, a place where people who wrote and had nowhere to put it could publish to a small audience that would actually read the thing and say something back. In Turkish the equivalents mostly ran on forums and personal pages instead of dedicated sites, which changed the plumbing and very little else.

The part that makes Poema worth a page here is the eighteen years. Amateur writing communities are not usually durable. They run on one person's patience with moderation queues and hosting bills, and when that patience runs out, so does the site. Kuryłowicz stayed with it from 2000 to 2018. He warned people more than a year ahead to save their work, and then did exactly what he had said he would do.

~ where everyone went ~

Poemax.pl, the site Kuryłowicz pointed his users at on the night he locked the doors, is a near copy of what Poema did. That is the ordinary succession for a community like this one. The software is replaceable and the people are the asset, so when a host gives up, the regulars reassemble next door under a name one letter different.

ArchiveTeam got a copy out first. On 21 March 2018, two weeks before the farewell, a volunteer put poema.pl into ArchiveBot. The job ran about two days, finished on 23 March, and went into the Wayback Machine. The crawl happened while the site was frozen and fully readable, which is the best possible moment to catch anything. Two weeks later the originals were gone.

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