So-net Blog (SS Blog)

» see blog.ss-blog.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

So-net Blog was Japanese all the way down, which for a blog host is the entire product. There is nothing for me to be nostalgic about at this distance and I am not going to pretend otherwise. A blog service is its posts, and its posts were written in a language I do not read, by people whose internet ran on a set of names that never appeared on my screen.

What I can read is the shape, and the shape is familiar anywhere. So-net was Sony's internet service provider in Japan, the same category of company as TTNet was for me, and like every ISP in that decade it decided its subscribers should have somewhere to publish. The closed beta opened on 15 September 2004. Open beta followed on 24 November with twenty megabytes of image space per account, which was generous at the time and is now less than a single photograph off any phone.

It grew the way these things grew. Video uploads and half a gigabyte of storage in October 2005. A full gigabyte and mobile phone support in April 2007. Paid tiers from December 2009. Somewhere in there the whole idea of keeping a personal weblog stopped being what people did with an internet connection, and the service kept running anyway, because turning it off costs a decision and leaving it on does not.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Japan had a denser blog-hosting market than almost anywhere, and So-net Blog was never the biggest name in it. Ameba and Hatena and Livedoor were the ones that produced recognizable public writing. So-net Blog was the default that came attached to a subscription, which is a different and quieter kind of position. You did not choose it so much as find you already had it.

That turns out to matter for how a service dies. A platform people chose gets defended when it wobbles. A platform people were handed gets migrated, and only by whoever still remembers the password.

~ the handoffs ~

The engine underneath was never fully Sony's to begin with. In February 2008 the service migrated onto Seesaa's BlogServer software over three days, so the company whose name was on the door was already renting the machinery from the company that would later own the whole thing.

On 1 October 2019 Sony renamed it SS Blog and moved it to a new domain, which is the standard signal that a parent has decided a product is no longer worth carrying its brand. On 1 June 2020 the business was transferred outright to Seesaa. On 1 January 2024 Seesaa was merged into its parent, Fun Communications, and SS Blog went along with the furniture. Fourteen months later Fun Communications closed it.

~ the last year ~

The end was announced in late 2024 with a date of 31 March 2025 and a migration tool pointed at Seesaa Blog. The detail that stung was that this move had to be done by hand, account by account, unlike the 2020 transfer from So-net Blog to SS Blog, which had happened automatically while everyone slept.

So the last act asked twenty one years of writers to individually notice and then press a button, in a period when most of them had not thought about the account in a decade. The arithmetic on that is not encouraging. Whatever was not manually carried across on the last day is not anywhere now.

~ what got buried with it ~

The material loss here is enormous and almost entirely invisible from outside Japan. Twenty one years of ordinary Japanese people writing about their commutes and their cooking and their illnesses is a primary record of a country's private life through the 2000s, and effectively none of it was ever indexed anywhere an English-speaking archivist would think to look.

That is the part worth saying plainly from a distance. The dead sites people mourn loudly are the ones that were loud while alive. The heavier losses are hosts like this one, which were never famous in any language but their own and took a whole national decade of small writing down with them on a Monday in spring.

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