Remember Xanga? You probably used to have an account, but then Myspace, Facebook, and Tumblr happened. Now Xanga is so desperate that it’s crowdfunding $60,000 so that it can hope to become a paid-for service. The outleak is rather bleak, so luckily there’s one way to keep “visiting” the site, as some dedicated users are keeping a very, very stripped down “database” (if you can even call it that) of the platform.
A Xanga fanboy who goes by the alias CaKaLusa is trying hard to breathe some life into the possibly dead platform. It’s a noble effort, we’ll give him that, to create a database with on a shared Google Doc of Xanga blogs ported to platforms like Tumblr, WordPress, Blogpost, or their own hosted domain, but as of this writing only about 80 people are participating. Still, the information it does provide is thorough: Next to each blogger’s Xanga URL, you’ll see where the new blog domain is being ported to as well as where you can find them on various other social networks. And in same causes, you’ll find said blogger’s bra size. Yes, really.
The same guy, CaKaLusa, drummed up supporters with the hope of gaming Reddit and pointing Redditors to Xanga’s crowdfunding campaign. But attempts appear to have fallen flat, with the first one drumming up just 33 Karma points (99 upvotes and 66 downvotes), while the other, submitted to /r/technology performed just a little better with 55 Karma points (155 upvotes and 104 downvotes).
While these pure user efforts aren’t gaining too much traction, the company has raised over a third of the total $60,000 that’s being asked for ($22,406 at the time of this writing). There’s one month left, so we’ll have to wait and see where Xanga’s fate lies.
But will the larger Internet care? The Reddit comments seem divided.
If Xanga’s crowdfunding efforts fail, remember you have until July 15 to download all of your data. So go dig up your old account for nostalgia’s sake and retrace your Internet steps.
