Xuite

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

~ the obit ~

xuite was a taiwanese thing, and it stayed one. it ran in chinese, it lived inside chunghwa telecom's world, and it never had a reason to reach a dial-up kid in turkey. i found it the way i find a lot of these now, by reading about the shutdown after it happened. what stops you is the size. this was not a small hobby site.

chunghwa telecom, taiwan's largest phone company, started xuite around 2005 as a blog and album platform, the name pronounced like "sweet". through the late 2000s it became one of the places where taiwanese people kept diaries and photo albums. by the time it closed it held about 51 million accounts and well over a billion photos, honestly a staggering amount of ordinary life for one service.

the ending was a business decision, not a scandal. chunghwa announced it would retire xuite and, on 31 august 2023, the servers stopped at two in the afternoon local time. archive team scrambled to save what it could beforehand, but a platform that size does not fit in a rescue. most of those billion photos went dark that afternoon, and that was it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what got buried with it ~

the thing about a national blog platform dying is how much unrecorded life goes with it. wretch, the yahoo-owned taiwanese blog service, had already closed in 2013, so xuite's death took the second big archive of a generation's writing. these were not influencers. back then. they were students and retirees keeping albums, the kind of pages nobody backs up because they assume the host is forever.

~ the day it died ~

there is no soft landing for a shutdown like this. one afternoon in august the login worked, and by the next the domain answered with nothing. taiwan had a small wave of people saving screenshots and pdfs in the weeks before, but most users only learned it was gone once it was gone. a telecom cleaned house, and eighteen years of a country's small daily uploads went with the cleaning.

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