Soup.io

» see soup.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

soup.io was a tumblelog from vienna. christopher clay and his two co-founders launched it in april 2007, the same year tumblr launched in new york, and the two teams were not copying each other so much as arriving at the same idea from opposite sides of the atlantic. the format was the same in both cases: one short post type for each thing you might want to post (link, quote, video, image, audio, text), one infinite-scroll stream, one reblog button. soup added a file upload feature up to 10 mb and an event-creation widget that tumblr never bothered with.

the audience that found soup was the german-speaking emo and gothic scene with a smaller dutch and eastern european contingent attached. by 2009 the guardian had added soup.io to its 100 essential websites list. by march 2015 it was at 3.8 million monthly users. the visual aesthetic was darker than mainstream tumblr (less pastel hellscape, more black with a thin pink accent), which matched the scene-coded audience.

the financial story is a small tragedy. clay was on a fundraising tour in the us in 2008 trying to close a round when the financial crisis broke and the term sheets evaporated. tumblr did its later rounds in a recovered environment and pulled away. soup ran on donations and a tiny ad income for the next twelve years, suffered a major data loss in january 2017 that required restoring from a 2015 backup, and finally announced on 18 june 2020 that it would shut down on 20 july. the domain was later picked up by an unrelated content farm.

soup.io did not really cross into turkey. the turkish 2010-2015 microblogging window ran on ekşi sözlük for text and on facebook / twitter for everything else, with tumblr taking the english-fluent slice that wanted reblog culture. i was twenty-three when soup launched, already deep in university and on twitter from 2008, and the bilingual emo scene in vienna was not a community i had any path into. this is one of those graves where the cultural moment was real for a specific european audience, and that audience does not include me. it deserves a marker anyway.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the soup format had one thing tumblr did not: the soup. your account was called your soup, your dashboard was your soup, when someone reblogged your post it was said to "land in their soup." the language was lightly absurdist on purpose. there was a friends list and a public discovery stream, and the reblog mechanism credited the chain back to the original soup so attribution survived the share even when the post moved across a dozen accounts.

aggregation was the other distinguishing feature. you could pipe in your flickr, your last.fm scrobbles, your youtube favorites, your twitter timeline, your delicious bookmarks, all flowing into the same soup as native posts. this turned the platform into a personal lifestream years before friendfeed got popular for doing roughly the same thing in english.

~ the cracks ~

the 2017 data loss was the canonical wound. the database failed in january. the team tried for weeks to recover it, and what eventually came back online was reconstructed from a backup almost two years old. anything posted between 2015 and 2017 was gone. some users left immediately; others stayed but stopped posting, treating their soup as a museum rather than a living feed. the audience never fully rebuilt after that.

the slow attrition that followed was about money. clay said in the shutdown post that the hosting bill plus moderation plus the gdpr-compliance work was higher than the donations and ads were covering. the team had been keeping the lights on out of personal stubbornness for years. by mid 2020 there was no version of the math that worked.

~ what got buried ~

the soup.io archive team rescue mirrored what it could in the june-to-july 2020 window before the shutdown. the dump is large but incomplete, and a lot of private or password-protected soups never made it out. the scene that lived on soup mostly moved to tumblr, twitter or a small post-2020 federation of mastodon instances, and the specific visual language of vienna-coded gothic 2010-tumblr does not really exist anywhere now. the domain redirects to spam.

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