Tribe.net

» see tribe.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

tribe never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a san francisco bay area-coded product, a 2003 social network for the friendster generation of people who happened to also be in the burning man and bay area creative-arts demographic. the user base was concentrated within a few zip codes of oakland and the mission, spilling out into a wider west-coast crowd up the seattle corridor. nothing about the launch was aimed at europe or anywhere in the global south.

the company was founded in early 2003 by paul martino as ceo, with mark pincus and valerie syme as co-founders. funding came from the mayfield fund alongside knight ridder, with newspaper money in from the washington post company too. the editorial pitch was a hybrid between friendster's friend-of-a-friend social graph and craigslist's classifieds and event-listings model, organized around interest-based groups they called tribes. you could join a tribe for swing dancing or for the playa. inside the tribe you posted events and listed things for sale, or found rides to burning man. from there you could thread back out into the wider friend graph.

tribe ran for a few years as a real bay area social network with about half a million members by late 2006. then cisco bought the underlying technology in march 2007 as part of an enterprise social-software play that did not really work out. mark pincus had already pivoted to a new project called zynga in 2007 that would soon eat most of his attention. the consumer site continued under a holding company for the next decade with steadily declining traffic until it went offline in early 2017 after a child-exploitation content incident the small remaining team could not moderate. the domain later became a community-run mastodon server in 2023.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

tribe launched in june 2003 with a model that briefly looked like it could win. friendster had launched in march of the same year with a pure social-graph approach that did not give you much to actually do once you had your friends listed. tribe answered the "now what" question by attaching real classifieds and event listings to each tribe, which gave the platform a transactional anchor friendster lacked. for about eighteen months it was a credible third entry behind friendster and the new myspace.

the burning man tilt happened organically. enough of the founding team and early users were involved with burning man that the playa tribes filled up fast. by 2004 tribe had become the de facto online infrastructure for camp coordination and ride sharing, plus the year-round social scene around the event. the brand association narrowed the audience but also gave tribe a defensibility friendster never had. you could move on from a social graph easily, but the burning man logistics layer was harder to replicate.

~ the unraveling ~

by 2006 facebook had opened to the general public and the wider social-network category was consolidating fast. tribe's core audience drifted to facebook events and to email lists hosted on yahoo groups. an august 2006 sf weekly piece described the site as "going the way of friendster," which was the polite version of the conversation already happening inside the company.

mark pincus stepped back in as ceo in august 2006 after the financial situation became untenable. he formed a new corporation called utah street networks that bought the distressed assets out of the original tribe networks. he spent some months trying to reset the platform, then in early 2007 cisco acquired the underlying technology for an enterprise social-collaboration project. pincus shifted his full attention to zynga later that year. the consumer site was left running on the utah street holding entity with a small team and no real product roadmap.

~ the long tail ~

tribe ran for another decade in this maintenance state. by 2010 most of the active tribes had migrated to facebook groups or moved to private email lists. the burning man infrastructure use case shifted to a combination of facebook events and eplaya forums, with the official burning man org's own digital tools handling the rest. tribe's residual user base in 2015 was a few thousand people, mostly long-time bay area accounts who had been there since 2003 and never bothered to leave.

the formal shutdown in early 2017 came after the remaining team could not moderate a child-exploitation content incident that turned up on the platform. the site was pulled offline with no replacement. the domain stayed parked for several years. in february 2023 a community-run mastodon instance took over the address and started using the brand for a federated social server, which is a strange but oddly fitting second life for a domain that had spent its first life trying to organize the bay area's interest groups around small bounded communities.

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