Tiddlyspot

» see tiddlyspot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 22 October 2020 a site called booknotes.tiddlyspot.com was still serving 93 kilobytes of somebody's reading notes. By three in the morning UTC on 24 October, that address and every other one on the domain was serving the same 1 KB page: "tiddlyspot.com is almost here! Upload your website to get started." That is DreamHost's placeholder for an empty hosting account. The same day, Simon Baird posted on the Tiddlyspot blog to explain that DreamHost had moved the entirety of the site data into DreamObjects backup storage, on the grounds that Tiddlyspot sites amount to personal backups, which its terms of use do not allow.

Tiddlyspot had launched in 2006, built by Simon and Daniel Baird, and it existed to solve one specific problem. TiddlyWiki, Jeremy Ruston's 2004 invention, is a wiki that lives inside a single HTML file and rewrites itself as you type, which makes it wonderful on a disk and awkward on the web, because a web page cannot ordinarily save over itself. Tiddlyspot gave you a subdomain with a copy of the file on it, plus a plugin that pushed your changes back up. You put a password inside the wiki and clicked save, and the notebook was online.

There was no account system worth the name and no company. It was two people and a hosting bill, and it ran like that for fourteen years, which is most of the reason it filled up with lecture notes and personal task systems belonging to people who had never had anywhere else to put them.

The warning signs were there well before the end. DreamHost had already lost the service once, in June 2012, when a RAID controller failed and the restore from backup took days and ate recent edits. Simon's own post in 2020 is blunt about the state of the thing: pretty cool when it was new, then aged badly and neglected by its owners for years. He also names the bug that gave DreamHost its argument, which is that old versions of each wiki were piling up instead of being pruned, so the disk really did look like a backup farm.

~ the case file ~

~ the rescue that happened first ~

Archive Team was already crawling Tiddlyspot when it died. Through late September and October 2020 its bots walked the subdomains one at a time, and the capture log reads like a directory of the thing: tesis, chemotaxis, pythonwiki, sidebarpluginvault, tiddlyfolio, moodle, brainimaging. Around 130 subdomains are documented on the wiki page and the archiving status is marked saved. The last of those grabs ran on 22 October, two days before DreamHost emptied the account, which is the only reason this death can be dated to the hour.

~ one file, no server ~

I am an engineer and I was online in Turkey on dial-up from 1998, then in the internet cafes through the early 2000s, and the appeal of a wiki that is one file was obvious to anybody in that situation. The machine in front of you was not yours. You did not install things on it. A notebook that is a single HTML file travels on a USB stick or as an email attachment to yourself, and it opens in whatever browser the cafe has. Tiddlyspot was the part that made that file reachable from the next machine you sat down at, for free, without an account.

That is also why its death was so total. Everything was inside the file, including the password, so when the files went into cold storage there was no separate database left behind to recover from and no export anybody could have run.

~ the inheritance ~

Simon came back. By 29 October 2020 the domain served a notice saying Tiddlyspot was in data recovery mode, with sites readable but saving and new site creation switched off. In February 2021 he announced Tiddlyhost, an open-source rebuild with real accounts and proper TiddlyWiki 5 support, where you could claim the Tiddlyspot site you used to own. By March the old save-to-web trick worked again. In September 2022 the blog posted a last call to preserve old Tiddlyspot sites.

Tiddlyhost holds the tiddlyspot.com domain today and serves the surviving old wikis out of it, which makes this an unusually gentle grave: the corpse is being maintained by one of the people who built it. The service that died is still dead, though. The thing that ended on 24 October 2020 was free, accountless hosting where the only credential was a line of text inside your own file, and nobody is bringing that back.

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