Streetfiles

» see streetfiles.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Graffiti gets photographed more than it gets seen. A piece on a trackside wall in Berlin lasts until the next buff or the next writer, which might be a week, and the photograph is the only version of it anyone outside that neighborhood will ever look at. Streetfiles was built on exactly that: an open archive where anyone could upload what they had shot, filed by city and by writer.

The idea goes back to 1998 and a Berlin graffiti fan who wanted a picture database that anybody could add to. That first attempt did not survive. In 2007 three developers took the project over, and in July 2008 they relaunched it as Streetfiles.org.

By April 2013 it held 800,630 photos from 89,476 registered users and was drawing around 18,000 visitors a day. On 13 March 2013 Esher, one of the three, posted the announcement: "Streetfiles is going down on the 30th of April. Yes, we are going to switch the site completely off on that day." They did.

Berlin writing culture sat a long way from anything I was part of, and I came to this one late, through the record of how it ended rather than through the site itself. What carries across is the archive problem underneath, which has nothing to do with graffiti. Eight hundred thousand photographs of things that no longer exist, held by three people with a hosting bill and a legal problem, has exactly one outcome unless somebody else steps in.

~ the dossier ~

~ forty four thousand euros ~

The site was not failing. Traffic held steady and the archive kept growing. What closed it was roughly 44,000 euros owed to investors from the project's first incarnation, the one that had already collapsed before the Berlin team picked the pieces up in 2007.

They had inherited the contracts along with the pictures. Five years of running a popular site on no meaningful revenue does not produce 44,000 euros, and the developers worked out that switching the thing off cost less than carrying a debt for a version of it they had not built.

~ sorry we're dead ~

On 29 April 2013, the day before the end, the homepage carried a banner across the top reading "Sorry, Streetfiles will be switched OFF tomorrow." Below it sat the site's own mark, a teal handstyle tag. Under that ran the tagline it had used for years: "It's all about having a good time by doing bad things."

Archive Team ran a Warrior project against it in the final weeks, deliberately rate-limited so the grab would not take the site down ahead of schedule. What they got is partial. Photos were served from sequential URLs running to roughly 785,152, and the job was organized around user accounts, of which only the first 5,000 or so had been loaded when the clock ran out.

streetfiles.org still resolves. It serves 1,103 bytes of hand-written HTML holding one teal heading: Sorry / We're Dead / again. That last word is the only acknowledgment anywhere on the live web that the 2008 relaunch had something before it. Underneath sits a link to an Instagram account, and a link to the old Facebook page with comment markers around it.

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