Thirteen Years and Then Nothing
Blogsport started in 2005 as a side project by two German students who left the registration open and got flooded with users they hadn’t planned for. By 2009 it was the primary hosting platform for the German leftist blogging scene—thousands of blogs, a genuinely independent corner of the web that owed nothing to Google or Facebook or any of the platforms that would eventually absorb everything. Now it’s shutting down, and another piece of the old internet goes with it.
Georg Klauda, who ran the platform, gave an interview to Netzpolitik.org that’s worth reading. Around 2009, blogging was the absolute hype. Back then, blogs were mostly run by individuals who linked to and commented on each other.
He estimates more than ten thousand blogs were registered on the platform, though by the end only a few hundred were still active. The more honest line: After thirteen years, we’re increasingly exhausted. We have to deal with technology, support, accounting, and responding to legal complaints—even though we don’t even blog ourselves anymore.
That’s what kills things. Not competition. Just accumulated weight.
What Blogsport represented—what that whole era of independent hosting represented—was a version of the internet where the infrastructure was run by people who used it, for reasons that weren’t primarily commercial. The students who started it couldn’t make a living from it; it stayed a hobby demanding professional-level attention indefinitely. The math was never going to hold. Whether the archive survives in any form is still unclear: the legal exposure of hosting old content—defamation, privacy requests, the right to erasure—means someone has to keep taking responsibility for things written years ago by people who’ve since become different people. Nobody wants that job for free.
We’ve been told blogs are dead for roughly a decade now, usually by journalists at media companies who would prefer the alternative not exist. Blogsport shutting down is something more specific: a platform built by volunteers who actually believed in independent publishing, worn down by the logistics of keeping something alive. Facebook and Google didn’t kill it. Time did. If you have favorites on there, export them now before the window closes. And if you want to start something of your own—WordPress still exists, still works, and still doesn’t own what you write.