Thirty Years of Taiwan’s Online Communities: Recovering URLs, Losing Photos, and the History of Displacement

30-Second Overview: Taiwan has grown its own online platforms twice—Ming Pao Personal News Channel and Wretch (Wu Ming Xiao Zhan)—the former was strangled by the 2001 internet bubble and rescued by user self-help groups, while the latter was acquired by Yahoo and had its power cut on December 26, 2013. At other times, Taiwanese people have lived on other people’s servers. Over thirty years, we moved from BBS to Wretch, squeezed from Wretch into Facebook, retreated from Facebook into LINE groups, and peeked out from LINE groups to look at Threads. Every move meant losing a batch of photos, a batch of comments, and a stretch of youth. Similarweb measured in May 2024 that Taiwanese people spent an average of 11 minutes and 31 seconds on Threads, the highest in the world—compared to 5 minutes and 12 seconds for Americans and 3 minutes and 6 seconds for Japanese¹. We spend the most time in the most insecure rental spaces. The thirty-year migration history is told as a clean line of evolution (BBS → Wretch → FB → LINE → Threads), but this line filters out the most critical fact: every move was a re-statement of "whose land this is," and Taiwanese people have always been tenants.

The Black-and-White City-State, and the First "Eviction"

The story does not begin where everyone assumes it does today. In 1992, Professor Chen Nian-hsing (陳年興) at the National Sun Yat-sen University’s Computer and Network Center set up a BBS server, naming it "Beauty Island" (Meili Zhi Dao). This was Taiwan’s first full-Chinese Internet BBS². Before that, in 1984, the Ministry of Education had already decided to push the TANet academic network through National Chiao Tung University and National Sun Yat-sen University³. The internet was a pipe laid with taxpayer money, the universities were the endpoints of the pipe, and the BBS was a city-state that grew organically at the endpoint of that pipe.

On September 14, 1995, Tu I-jin (杜奕瑾), a student in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan University, launched PTT in Room 618 of Male Dormitory 8 using a 486DX266 machine with 16MB of RAM⁴. That machine had nothing to do with Silicon Valley. In a student dormitory, using the school’s network, a free BSD system, and the time of a person staying up all night, it was built. Early users were mostly NTU students; registration required a student ID, and posting required real names before switching to IDs. The system was black-and-white, crude enough to run only text, but its stickiness was unimaginable.

The term "Xiangmin" (鄉民, villagers/netizens) grew out of this black-and-white landscape. In 2004, during the "Good Person's Counterattack" incident on PTT’s Nightlife Forum, the site administrator Junchoon (real name Huang Chien-yu) intervened and quoted a line from Stephen Chow’s movie Hail the Judge: "I’m just a villager coming to watch the show, only standing a bit forward," and wrote "Please let the watching 'villagers' step back behind the yellow line"⁵. A street-smart sophistry from a Hong Kong comedy film was picked up by an administrator mediating a dispute and became the most important self-designation in Taiwan’s online subculture. This term was later mistakenly attributed to Tu I-jin as the inventor, but he was merely the builder, not the namer. The right to name fell to the second-generation site administrator.

The "eviction" of the BBS era came early and was very Taiwanese. In the late 1990s, TANet began strictly regulating non-academic uses, and many BBS sites with commercial coloring were required to move out of the academic network or switch to commercial ISPs like HiNet⁶. The reason for the first collective move had nothing to do with "a better platform appearing"; it was simply because the landlord (the school) said only students could live here and no stalls could be set up. Free pipes come with conditions, and that condition is "don’t look too much like a business." This condition would return later, in the form of the "Wretch Case," becoming the sharpest public property dispute in Taiwan’s community history.

Taiwan Grows Its Own Platform for the First Time, but the Bubble Kills It First

Fast-forward to February 15, 2000. On that day, Ming Pao was founded by Chan Hung-chi (詹宏志), with NT$400 million in funding, hundreds of journalists, and a promise that shocked everyone: 24-hour daily updates, always on, all news free⁷. Ming Pao’s core was a news website, but what truly changed Taiwan’s internet history was the decision two months later: on April 11, 2000, Ming Pao launched "Personal News Channel," allowing every reader to open their own news site and post their own articles⁸. This was three full years before Wretch launched its blog service in 2003, marking the first germination of Taiwan’s blog culture.

Then the internet bubble burst. On February 21, 2001, Ming Pao ceased publication, burning NT$300 million in 370 days, with only NT$100 million left in the accounts⁹. Chan Hung-chi wrote calmly in the cessation statement, but the Personal News Channel users were not calm; they had been writing diaries, uploading photos, and meeting netizens there for a year. Once the cessation announcement was out, users formed a self-help group, gathered site administrators, launched petitions, and demanded a delay in closing the site. The Ming Pao board of directors was pushed by these strangers, extending the closure date to March 31, and finally finding PChome to take over management¹⁰.

This is the most counter-intuitive segment in Taiwan’s internet history: a platform defeated by capital was saved not by capital, but by a group of free users. Ming Pao Personal News Channel has survived from 2000 to the present; it survived Wretch’s closure and Xuite’s winding down, making it Taiwan’s oldest existing blog service. Its survival method is very Taiwanese: relying not on venture capital to extend its life, but on a group of people who felt "my things stay here," calling the administrator out for a meeting, and bringing the board of directors back to the table.

But the irony of this story is that no one felt it was a victory at the time. The news headlines were "Ming Pao Closes," "Internet Bubble Bursts," "Internet Economy Dream Shatters." The life-extension of Personal News Channel was treated as a small footnote in post-closure arrangements. Taiwan’s first self-grown, usable, and loved platform was swept away by the global internet bubble, and the credit for saving it was forgotten for twenty years. The next time Taiwan grew its own platform, Wretch, it would face the same problem, but this time, even a self-help group couldn’t save it.

500 Million Photos, and a Switch That Can Be Turned Off

In 1999, Jian Zhi-yu (簡志宇) from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Chiao Tung University, along with students Wu Wei-kai, Lin Hung-chuan, Chiu Chien-hsi, Chen Hsuan-yen, and Pan Wei-cheng, set up "Wretch" (Wu Ming Xiao Zhan) in the school’s computer room¹¹. Initially just a nickname for a BBS site, it launched its trio of blog, photo album, and message board in 2003. These three things formed the standard equipment for Taiwan’s youth: writing love letters in the blog, putting graduation trip photos in the album, and arguing on the message board¹².

In 2005, Wretch moved out of NCTU and established a company with NT$20 million¹³. A September 2006 report in Guanghua Magazine left these numbers: 2.3 million members, 500 million photos, 1.2 million visits per day¹⁴. This scale was overwhelming in Taiwan at the time, larger than any other local internet service, with higher stickiness. This was not sent by Silicon Valley; it was born in Taiwan.

On December 13, 2006, Yahoo announced the acquisition of Wretch. Rumors suggested a price of approximately NT$700 million, but the official amount was never disclosed¹⁵. At that moment, Taiwan’s tech circle thought this was a victory: a local team sold to a multinational company, founders became the richest, and Taiwan finally had its own success story. But things quickly became complicated. On January 8, 2007, DPP Legislator Tang Huo-sheng held a press conference, accusing Wretch of being hosted on the TANet academic network from the start, raising a commercial service using free academic resources, and finally selling to Yahoo was "using public instruments for private gain, commercially immoral"¹⁶.

This controversy never truly ended. Academic papers left this criticism: "Wretch’s success was built on the abuse of public resources from the academic network and dishonesty toward users. Its commercialization process severely harmed the public property rights of the academic network and internet publicness."¹⁷ The part about dishonesty toward users refers to the commercial transition in 2005; users woke up to find their blogs had become ad carriers and their photo albums had become containers that required payment to view fully. The dissatisfaction at the time was quickly overshadowed by the "finally sold" narrative of the Yahoo acquisition, but this entanglement would return in another form in 2013.

Seven years later, on December 26, 2013, Yahoo奇Mo announced that Wretch and Yahoo Blog would close on the same day¹⁸. Those 500 million photos, those 2.3 million accounts, that decade of youth, were power-cutoff by a remote decision. Jian Zhi-yu later left a quote in an interview with bnext: "The thing I regret most in my life is that the Jian Zhi-yu of 2005 was not thinking with the mind of the Jian Zhi-yu of 2010. The Jian Zhi-yu of 2010 could speak English, knew how an international company operates, and had managed a larger team. If you put him in 2005, everything would be different... Although Wretch would inevitably end, at least this war would have lasted a bit longer."¹⁹ This reads like an entrepreneur’s last words, but a sharper reading is: what he regrets is that he didn’t have strong enough capabilities back then to negotiate with Yahoo, failing to keep a switch that couldn’t be turned off.

After the switch was truly turned off, in December 2016, ETtoday reported a scene that reappeared every year: users opening old blog links from ten years ago, seeing a blank screen, seeing 404 errors, seeing their vanished youth²⁰. This went beyond personal memory; it was the displacement of an entire generation. High school love letters, first love photos, and full albums of university club activities were all left in the meeting minutes of some Yahoo internal decision-making meeting, where a product manager calculated traffic, revenue, and maintenance costs, then signed. At the moment of signing, the youth of over two million Taiwanese people became a row of deletion in an internal KPI spreadsheet.

More sharply, users at the time did not have the option to "export." Wretch’s photo albums had no official backup tools, no batch download function, no ZIP file to pack and take away. Yahoo had provided a brief moving tool before closing the site, but the destination was Tumblr or Pixnet, one another US company, the other local but which also experienced multiple ownership changes. Moving was never going home; it was changing landlords to continue renting.

Taiwanese People Plurk, Don’t Tweet: How a Local Platform Was Squeezed into a Corner

While Wretch was still alive, on May 12, 2008, the microblogging service Plurk, made by a Canadian team, went live²¹. Its timeline was horizontal, it had a Karma system, and it gave you emojis and special features based on activity level—a very Taiwanese design sense, although the development team was not in Taiwan. Plurk captured the Taiwan market before Twitter entered, and the degree of capture was so great that "Taiwanese people Plurk, don’t tweet" became the standard observation in the internet world for those years²².

Numbers speak. In 2011, Taiwanese users accounted for about 40.8% of Plurk’s global traffic; by 2018, this ratio rose to 74.6%²³. That is, in the later stage, Plurk almost became a microblogging service exclusive to Taiwan, with fewer and fewer foreign users. From one angle, this phenomenon is a victory for Taiwan’s stickiness, but from another, when a platform becomes increasingly exclusive to Taiwanese people, it becomes harder to raise the next round of funding, harder to retain technical talent, and harder to compete with global giants. Plurk didn’t die, but it stopped in place.

The reason it stopped had little to do with technology and mostly with crowds. In 2009, Taiwan’s Facebook users were only around 100,000; by the end of the year, it soared to over 5 million, with 3.5 million coming from a game called FarmVille. On December 9, 2009, the Traditional Chinese version of FarmVille went live, and Taiwanese people started secretly growing vegetables at work, waking up at midnight at home to harvest, and stealing each other’s greens. This collective obsession turned Facebook from a "thing used by American students" into something where everyone from middle-aged to teenagers had an account²⁴.

FarmVille itself wasn’t particularly interesting; it was a Flash-based, slow-paced vegetable-growing game. But it got one thing right that Plurk didn’t at the time: it turned social relationships into gamifiable costs. You steal my vegetables, so I go comment on your wall; I want to see who stole my vegetables, so I must log into Facebook; I want to invite friends to play together, so I must pull friends from MSN into Facebook. Within three months, Taiwan’s middle-class mothers, civil servant fathers, and high school daughters were all pulled into the same social network by a virtual vegetable garden.

Plurk had no countermeasure. Its horizontal timeline, Karma system, and emoji unlocks were still there for users, but people around them were on Facebook, family on Facebook, colleagues on Facebook. That social gravity was so strong that many felt "what I write on Plurk is unseen." A strong local platform doesn’t need to be defeated; it just needs to be bypassed by crowds. Plurk was later strategically invested in by Chinese capital in the 2010s and acquired by Malaysia’s SEA Group in 2016. It is still alive, but it is now one of the few old places where a few people go to visit relatives in the corner of Taiwan’s internet²⁵.

"Did You Steal Vegetables Today?": Foreign Beasts Trade Away Three Million People with a Vegetable Garden

Zoom in a bit. Look at what happened in those three years from 2009 to 2012.

In early 2009, Facebook’s presence in Taiwan was very low. The mainstream was Wretch, Plurk, PTT, and MSN; Facebook was "something heard to be used by foreign college students." Then FarmVille arrived. Scenes remembered in reports: people in offices secretly switching windows, hiding Facebook behind Excel; midnight 2 AM phone alarms ringing because "the tomatoes are ripe"; colleagues’ greetings changing from "Have you eaten?" to "Did you steal vegetables today?"²⁶.

From 2010 to 2012, this was the binding period for Facebook in Taiwan. MSN was still there, but already feeling pressure: one, Facebook’s built-in instant messaging was getting better and better; two, MSN started crashing inexplicably, logging in inexplicably. Microsoft’s strategy during this period was very vague: MSN had no App, no mobile strategy, no clear product direction to compete with Facebook.

Then came January 8, 2013. Microsoft sent emails notifying all users that MSN would cease service on March 15, except in China. The actual global transfer date was April 8, 2013; on that day, MSN officially ceased service in Taiwan²⁷. Here is a number that has been misstated for many years: the common saying is "300 million MSN users poured into LINE," but the truth is Microsoft transferred about 100 million users to its own Skype. MSN’s global historical peak was about 300 million, but active users at the time of cessation in 2013 were only around 100 million, and the default migration destination was Skype, not LINE²⁸.

But in Taiwan, the biggest beneficiary of MSN’s death was indeed LINE. The reason goes back to June 23, 2011, the day LINE went live globally. LINE’s official record states clearly: "In response to the anxious days spent unable to contact family and friends following the Great East Japan Earthquake, the LINE app was launched on June 23, 2011."²⁹ This was a product of a Japanese team responding to the anxiety of family and friends being out of touch after the 311 Earthquake; from day one it was mobile-first, from day one a tool for "reporting safety."

Starting in February 2012, LINE launched aggressive advertising in Taiwan starring Gigi Lai (桂綸鎂), a chapter about phone calls and SMS, followed by a series of lifestyle scenes³⁰. This cannot be called a single viral event; it was more like a rare, intensive TV + MRT advertising offensive by a Japanese (Korean-owned) company in Taiwan’s media history. In November 2012, LINE’s Taiwan users broke 10 million³¹. MSN wasn’t dead yet, but LINE was already bigger than it.

When MSN ceased service in 2013, Taiwan’s family groups, colleague groups, and mom groups had already been running on LINE for over a year. Microsoft pushed users to Skype, but Taiwan users didn’t go; their friends, family, and colleagues were already on LINE. A communication software from a foreign entity, designed for Japan’s 311, inherited the network left by MSN in Taiwan. In June 2014, LINE Taiwan Limited was officially established in Taiwan³². By 2025, LINE’s monthly active users in Taiwan were 22 million, with a penetration rate of about 94%³³. Taiwan is stickier to LINE than Korea (where LINE lost to KakaoTalk locally) and Japan (LINE’s home field).

The strangeness of this replacement is: it looks like a rational choice, useful, free, family is there, but every step was not decided by Taiwanese people. Facebook used a vegetable garden to pull three million people away from local platforms; LINE used a wave of messaging software designed for Japan’s post-disaster to take away the entire MSN generation. We didn’t refuse, because there was no reason to; but we didn’t choose, because we weren’t asked.

Looking back at those four years from 2009 to 2013, it was the most thorough "foreign capital victory" in Taiwan’s community history. Local Wretch, local Ming Pao, local BBS culture, under the two waves of attack from foreign Facebook and foreign LINE, all retreated to the corner. This retreat had no TV debates, no referendums, no public discussion in any form. It was simply the product decisions of two overseas Apps that determined what the social infrastructure of an entire generation would look like. By the time we looked back in 2024 to discuss words like "digital sovereignty" and "data localization," it was already remedial class for that silent battle from over a decade ago.

Locking Public Dialogue into Elders’ Groups

After taking over Taiwan, LINE’s first thing was to privatize public dialogue.

In the Wretch era, blogs were public, had RSS, had trackbacks, and were indexed by Google. In the Facebook era, posts were still barely public, although the walls between inside and outside the wall got thicker and thicker, but at least classmates, clubs, and events still existed on Facebook in a searchable form. In the LINE group era, the entire community’s dialogue disappeared outside search engines, disappeared from history, disappeared from any range where external researchers could access it.

A 2024 investigation by The Reporter left this quote: "False information and controversial messages within LINE groups, through groups in communities, temples, political parties, and civil organizations, cause social division, stigmatize specific groups, and strengthen opposition."³⁴ The key to this observation is not "there is false information" (any platform has it), but the structure of "groups": it lets messages only circulate in acquaintances’ circles, lets messages be forwarded infinitely but be hard to refute externally, and lets media and fact-checking institutions almost penetrate nothing. LINE groups have become the undercurrent of Taiwan’s elections, public health, and social issues, but outsiders cannot see the source, flow rate, or endpoint of this undercurrent.

LINE’s Terms of Service Article 4.7 writes this logic plainly: "Accounts for this service belong exclusively to individuals. Users’ rights to use this service cannot be transferred, lent to third parties, or inherited by third parties."³⁵ This provision means: after you die, your LINE account and all conversations disappear with you. The words your mother said to you when she passed, the good morning picture your father sent you last, the chat records with your deceased friend, have no legal right of inheritance. In the physical world, a letter, a telegram, a diary, will be left to your family after you die; on LINE, the ownership of these things belongs to LY Corporation, not to your descendants.

This is the most silent clause of the platform era. No one thinks about their death when registering for LINE. But thirty years of internet history teaches us one thing: you will die, your password will die with you, your conversations will continue to exist on some cloud server, but no one can read them again. Taiwanese people delivered a lifetime of relationships on LINE, but never thought about where these relationships would go after we left.

At the same time, PTT was still there. Its users were aging; a MIC 2024Q4 survey said PTT’s main users were in the 35-44 age group (27.8%), while 18-24 year olds preferred IG (78%), Dcard (45.9%), and Threads (44%)³⁶. But PTT was doing something other platforms didn’t: all its posts were still in search engines, all history could still be cited, all controversies could still be accessed for academic research. PTT is the last fossil of public domain in Taiwan’s community history; it didn’t get bigger, but it didn’t turn off its own history.

During the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement, PTT was the most immediate broadcast station for students between the site and the outside world; during the 2018 same-sex marriage referendum, the Gossip Forum was an arena for massive discourse production; during the 2020 presidential election, long posts on PTT’s Gossip Forum were treated by academia as primary material for political communication research. This wouldn’t happen in LINE groups, not because no one discusses politics in LINE groups, but because discussions in LINE groups cease to exist once they leave that 200-person group. Whether a society has citable public discussion records determines what that society’s memory looks like. Taiwan’s fossil is still alive, but it is already a unique copy.

There Will Never Be Another Hegemon Again

In 2011, Lin Yu-chin (林裕欽), a sophomore in the Department of Information Management at National Taiwan University, made the first version of Dcard³⁷. Initially a small tool for "drawing a card every midnight to match with a stranger," it slowly became a college student discussion board, then the social platform with the highest usage rate among Taiwan’s 18-24 year old females. In 2015, Lin Yu-chin established Dcard Inc., turning Dcard from a student project into a complete company product³⁸.

On July 5, 2023, Meta launched Threads. It broke 5 million users in 6 hours, 100 million in 5 days³⁹, the fastest-growing internet service in history, period. Taiwan’s reaction was also fast. Similarweb measured in May 2024 showed that Taiwanese users spent an average of 11 minutes and 31 seconds on Threads, the highest in the world;同期 (same period) US was 5 minutes and 12 seconds, Japan 3 minutes and 6 seconds⁴⁰. A MIC 2024Q4 survey left another watershed: Threads’ usage rate in Taiwan reached 17.5%, surpassing PTT’s 17.1% for the first time⁴¹.

But the headline "Threads Surpasses PTT" is not as simple as it looks. For thirty years, every major community migration in Taiwan had a single hegemon: PTT in the BBS era, Wretch in the photo album era, MSN in the instant messaging era, Facebook in the social network era, LINE in the communication era. But this time in the 2020s, platforms are dispersed: young people exist in parallel on IG, Dcard, and Threads; each platform accounts for 40-80% penetration, but none can eat up an entire generation like LINE did⁴².

This dispersion has an ignored political significance. When your social life is dispersed across five platforms, you don’t spend ten years on any one of them; you write thoughts on Threads, put photos on IG, read gossip on Dcard, chat with family on LINE, voice chat with friends on Discord. Each platform gets your slice, not your whole self. This sounds like progress in digital sovereignty; you are no longer bound by a single platform, but it also means one thing: when the next major migration comes, no platform can take away an entire generation’s memory at once like Wretch did. Because no platform ever owned it all at once.

But the cost of "no single hegemon" is that Taiwanese users cut their time into five parts, storing them separately on the servers of five foreign companies. Threads is Meta’s, IG is Meta’s, LINE is Z Holdings’, Discord is Discord Inc.’s, TikTok is ByteDance’s. Local platforms didn’t even squeeze into the battlefield this time. Dcard is considered the local choice for the 18-24 year old female community, but its scale, its discourse influence, and its international map are very similar to Plurk’s situation in the late 2010s: strong, but bypassed by crowds.

On August 31, 2023, Xuite (Sui Yi Wo) began a three-stage closure; the blog platform that once absorbed Wretch bloggers in 2013 drove users out again⁴³. That wasn’t news; it was a too-familiar scene. Taiwanese people have moved many times. Every move, someone cries while flipping through old blogs, someone crawls through walls to find backups, someone finds halfway down that photo links are already dead. No one asks why this happens every few years.

Whose Power Socket Is Your Youth Plugged Into?

On March 19, 2025, a Threads user opened an account called @wretch_1999, with the bio: "★●○● Welcome to Wretch ●○●★ / Cumulative Visitors: 0000520 / Who Comes to My House / ♪♫ Background Music: 5566 - I’m Sad ♪♫"⁴⁴. The post said: "When will someone discover me? Revived" "If no one discovers me... it seems about time to close the site again."

This account was fan-made, not official; it wasn’t Yahoo reviving Wretch, it wasn’t technically reconnecting the power cut in 2013. This was a 2025 Taiwanese person, using Threads (Meta’s) to simulate a 2005 Wretch interface, including the era-specific "Cumulative Visitors 0000520," the era-specific "Who Comes to My House" visitor log, the era-specific "Background Music Auto-Play." He simulated not just the UI, but an entire generation’s memory of "owning a corner of the internet."

But this soul-summoning is plugged into Meta’s power socket. If one day Threads closes like Wretch did (this is no longer a question of if, but when; thirty years of history has told us the answer), then this @wretch_1999 will disappear too, one soul-summoning taken away by another displacement.

This is the shape of Taiwan’s thirty-year online community history. We moved from BBS to Wretch, squeezed from Wretch into Facebook, retreated from Facebook into LINE, peeked out from LINE to look at Threads. Every move left the previous generation’s memories behind the power switch that was turned off. We spend the world’s first 11 minutes and 31 seconds on Threads⁴⁵, meaning we put the most time, the most photos, the most conversations, into the most insecure rental space. When the next major migration comes, the fate of these things is not in our hands.

Ming Pao Personal News Channel is still alive today because of the 2001 user self-help group⁴⁶. Wretch died on December 26, 2013, because no self-help group blocked Yahoo’s decision. The difference between these two things has nothing to do with technology, capital, or business models; the key is whether users were treated as owners. For thirty years, the answer to this question was mostly "no."

Next time someone asks you "why back up photos," "why save your own blog," "why remember passwords you used before," you can tell them the story of that @wretch_1999 account. A 2025 Taiwanese person, using Meta’s servers, mourning Wretch closed by Yahoo, simulating 2005 youth. Every link in the whole thing does not belong to himself.

"If no one discovers me... it seems about time to close the site again"⁴⁷—when he wrote this sentence, he probably wasn’t joking. Thirty years, and we still haven’t learned how to own our own things.

Further Reading

• Wretch (Wu Ming Xiao Zhan) — Youth Placed on Someone Else’s Removable Server
• PTT (PiTiTi) — A City-State Grown from the Academic Network
• Facebook in Taiwan
• Threads in Taiwan — Threads and 11 Minutes 31 Seconds
• Instagram in Taiwan
• Miin — The Safe Haven of "Let’s Go, Let’s Go to Miin" in 2026

References