Pomf.se

» see pomf.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The front page of Pomf.se in March 2013 said that twelve thousand unique people had used it that month and that the operator had made zero dollars. It was a drag-and-drop upload box with a 50 MB limit, titled "Kawaii File Hosting", sitting on a Swedish domain and run by one person who posted as nekunekus. Alongside the uploader there was an IRC channel at irc.pomf.se and a paste service for text and code. There was never a business.

Its job was the one thing the big lockers had stopped doing by 2013. Upload a file, get back a short permanent link at a.pomf.se, send the link to whoever needed it. No account, no email, no wait timer, no interstitial page counting down at you. The audience that found it was the imageboard and anime-forum internet, and the site's copy was written for exactly that crowd, including a browser-detection message so rude it is not worth quoting here.

On 8 June 2015 the operator posted that Pomf.se would be shutting down after about two years of operation, sometime that month, because the bandwidth was costing more than one person wanted to carry and running it had stopped being fun. The end came the next day. On 9 June the front page changed to "Ohayou! Pomf has been shut down" with a link to the explanation, and within weeks it read simply "Sayonara".

~ the record ~

~ how to close a file host ~

Almost every file host in this graveyard died the same way: a deadline, a vague promise about exports, then silence and 404s. Pomf went out the other way, and it is the reason this grave can be written at all. The operator contacted Archive Team before shutting anything, and then cut public access to the uploaded files on 9 June for the stated purpose of freeing up every available bit of bandwidth so the archivists could download at full speed.

Archive Team ran a Warrior project for four days from that date and saved roughly 1.6 million files as WARCs into the Internet Archive. Then came the part that nobody does: all the old a.pomf.se links were pointed at the corresponding file on the Wayback Machine, so a link posted on a forum in 2014 still resolves to the image it was always supposed to show. The host has been dead for eleven years and the links still work.

~ the clone family ~

The software was on GitHub as nokonoko/Pomf from October 2013, and by the time the original closed its descendants were already running. The farewell page turned into a directory of them: pomf.hummingbird.moe, Maxfile.ro, 1339.cf, Mixtape.moe, Pomf.cat, Pantsu.cat, Bucket.pw. The last line pointed anyone who needed temporary hosting at Uguu.se, which was the operator's other site and which outlived this one by a decade.

"Pomf clone" became a category noun after that. Dozens appeared and most of them lasted months, though a handful are still up today. The repo sits at around 450 stars with no commits since 2021, which is the usual end state for infrastructure that got copied often enough that nobody needs the original maintained.

~ not my internet ~

Pomf belonged to a specific slice of the 2013 web, the one that signed its error messages with a heart and wrote its UI copy as an in-joke, and I was thirty, in Ankara, with a job. The file-sharing problem that pomf solved had already been solved for me and for most people by then, badly and corporately, by cloud storage with an account attached to it. Pomf's whole pitch was the refusal of that account, and it held the position for two years before the bandwidth bill ended the argument.

~ the domain today ~

pomf.se still answers, and it is not a squatter or a parking page. The title reads "Nekunekus" followed by a line of profanity, and it is the operator's own personal page. Eleven years after shutting the service down, the person who paid the bills still owns the address, which is a small thing and not nothing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »