Thirty Years of Taiwan Online Communities — A History of Lost Ground, Where the URLs Survive but the Photos Don't

30-second overview: Taiwan grew its own platforms twice — Tomorrow Times Personal News Stand and Wretch. The first was choked by the 2001 dot-com bust and rescued by a users' self-help committee; the second was acquired by Yahoo and had its power switch flipped off on a single day, December 26, 2013. The rest of the time, Taiwanese have lived on other people's servers. Across three decades we moved from BBS to Wretch, were pushed from Wretch onto Facebook, retreated from Facebook into LINE groups, then peeked out from LINE groups onto Threads — and each move shed a batch of photos, a batch of comments, a slice of someone's youth. In May 2024 Similarweb measured Taiwanese users spending an average of 11 minutes 31 seconds on Threads — the highest in the world, against 5:12 for Americans and 3:06 for Japanese in the same period¹. We pour the most time into the most precarious rental. The thirty-year migration tends to get told as a clean evolutionary arc (BBS → Wretch → FB → LINE → Threads), but that telling filters out the most important thing: every move is a re-stating of who owns the land, and Taiwanese have always been the tenants.

The black-screen-white-text city-state, and the first eviction

The story doesn't start where most people think. In 1992 at National Sun Yat-sen University, Professor Chen Nien-shing in the Computer & Network Center set up a BBS station, named it Beautiful Island (美麗之島), and it became the first all-Chinese Internet BBS in Taiwan². Before that, back in 1984, the Ministry of Education had already greenlit pushing the TANet academic network through National Chiao Tung University and National Sun Yat-sen³. The internet was a pipe the state laid with tax money, the schools were the endpoints of that pipe, and BBS was the city-state that grew on top of those endpoints by itself.

On September 14, 1995, Tu Yi-chen (杜奕瑾) of National Taiwan University's CS department booted up PTT in dorm room 618 of Men's Dorm 8 on a 486DX266 with 16MB of RAM⁴. That machine had nothing to do with Silicon Valley — a student dorm, the school's network, a free BSD system, and one person staying up late, that's what it took to put it up. Early users were mostly NTU students; registration required a student ID and posts went out under your real name before you could switch to a handle. The whole system was black background with white text, primitive enough to only handle plain text — and yet the engagement was unimaginable.

The word xiangmin (鄉民, "the villagers") grew right out of this black-on-white surface. In 2004, during the "Nice Guy's Counterattack" incident on PTT's Nightlife board, the sysop Junchoon (黃健祐 / Huang Chien-yu) stepped in to mediate and borrowed a line from Stephen Chow's Hail the Judge — Fang Tangjing's "I just came in with the villagers to watch the fun, I only stepped a bit forward" — writing, "Will the 'villagers' who came to watch the show please step back behind the yellow line"⁵. A street-corner weasel-line from a Hong Kong comedy, picked up casually by a sysop refereeing a dispute, became the most important self-designation in Taiwan's internet subculture. The term later got mis-remembered as having been coined by Tu Yi-chen, but he was only the site's builder, not its namer. Naming rights fell to the second-generation sysop.

The BBS-era "eviction" came early and was very Taiwan-specific. In the late 1990s, TANet began strict enforcement against non-academic uses, and many commercial-flavored BBS stations were ordered out of the academic network or onto commercial ISPs like HiNet⁶. The first mass move had nothing to do with "a better platform appearing." It was purely the landlord — the schools — saying this place is for students to live in, not to set up shop. The free pipe came with a condition, and the condition was: don't look too much like a business. That condition would later come back — as the Wretch case — to become the sharpest public-property dispute in the history of Taiwan's social platforms.

Taiwan grew its first platform — and the bubble killed it once

Pull the timeline back to February 15, 2000. That day Jan Hung-tze (詹宏志) launched Tomorrow Times (明日報): NT$400 million in funding, more than a hundred reporters, and a promise that startled everyone — 24/7, updated in real time, every piece of news free⁷. The body of Tomorrow Times was a news site, but what actually changed Taiwan's internet history was a decision two months later. On April 11, 2000, Tomorrow Times launched Personal News Stand (個人新聞台), letting any reader open their own news station and publish their own articles⁸. That was a full three years before Wretch even rolled out blog services in 2003, making it the headwater of Taiwan's blogging culture.

Then the dot-com bubble burst. On February 21, 2001, Tomorrow Times ceased publication; in 370 days it had burned through NT$300 million, with NT$100 million still on the books⁹. Jan Hung-tze sounded calm in the shutdown notice, but Personal News Stand users were not — they'd been writing diaries there for a year, uploading photos for a year, knowing each other online for a year. The moment the shutdown was announced, users organized themselves into a self-help committee, rallied station heads, petitioned, and demanded a delay. The Tomorrow Times board was pushed along by these strangers, eventually extending the closure to March 31 and handing the service to PChome to take over¹⁰.

This is the most counter-intuitive episode in Taiwan's internet history: a platform knocked down by capital was, in the end, kept alive not by capital but by a crowd of free users. Tomorrow Times Personal News Stand has been alive from 2000 to today — it outlived Wretch's shutdown, outlived Xuite's wind-down — and is the oldest surviving blog service in Taiwan. The way it survived is very Taiwanese: not from VC life support, but from a group of people who felt "my stuff is in there" hauling the sysops back to the table and the board back to the meeting room.

The irony is that at the time, no one experienced this as a win. The headlines were "Tomorrow Times collapses," "Dot-com bubble bursts," "Internet economy dream broken," and Personal News Stand's reprieve was treated as a footnote in the cleanup. The first time Taiwan grew a platform that worked and was loved, it got swept off by a global bubble, and the credit for saving it was forgotten for twenty years. Next time Taiwan grew its own platform — Wretch — it would hit the same problem, except this time even the self-help committee couldn't save it.

Five hundred million photos, and a power switch someone else could flip

In 1999, Chien Chih-yu (簡志宇) of NCTU's CS department and a handful of classmates — Wu Wei-kai, Lin Hung-chuan, Chiu Chien-hsi, Chen Hsuan-tien, Pan Wei-cheng — set up Wretch (無名小站) in a campus machine room¹¹. It started as just a BBS handle. In 2003 they rolled out the trio of blog, photo album, and guestbook — and those three things became the standard kit for a Taiwanese adolescence: love letters in blogs, school-trip photos in the album, fights in the guestbook¹².

In 2005, Wretch moved off NCTU and incorporated as a company with NT$20 million in capital¹³. Sinorama magazine's September 2006 report left these numbers behind: 2.3 million members, 500 million photos, 1.2 million daily visits¹⁴. That scale was overwhelming for Taiwan at the time — bigger and stickier than any same-period local internet service. It wasn't shipped from Silicon Valley. Taiwan grew it itself.

On December 13, 2006, Yahoo announced its acquisition of Wretch. Rumored at around NT$700 million, the official figure was never disclosed¹⁵. Taiwan's tech scene took it as a win at first — a local team sold to a multinational, the founder became one of the country's young rich, Taiwan finally had its own success story. But things got complicated fast. On January 8, 2007, DPP legislator Tang Huo-shen held a press conference accusing Wretch of having been built on TANet academic network from day one, of using free academic resources to grow a commercial service, and of being "publicly funded resources sold for private gain" when it was offloaded to Yahoo¹⁶.

That dispute never really ended. An academic paper left this critique: "Wretch's success was built on abuse of public academic-network resources and on bad faith toward its users. Its commercialization process seriously damaged the academic network's public property and the publicness of the internet."¹⁷ The "bad faith toward users" part refers to the 2005 commercialization pivot — users woke up one day to find their blogs had become ad units, their photo albums had become containers that required payment to use in full. The frustration of that moment was quickly papered over by the "finally sold" excitement of the Yahoo acquisition, but the knot would come back to be collected in 2013, in a different way.

Seven years later, on December 26, 2013, Yahoo Kimo announced that Wretch and Kimo Blog would shut down on the same day¹⁸. Those 500 million photos, those 2.3 million accounts, that decade of youth — flipped off at the power switch in one shot by a decision made far away. Chien Chih-yu later said in an interview with Business Next: "The thing I regret most in my life is that the Chien Chih-yu of 2005 wasn't thinking like the Chien Chih-yu of 2010. The 2010 me could speak English, knew how an international company operates, had managed a bigger team — put that version of me into 2005 and everything would have gone differently… Wretch was always going to end, but at least the fight would have lasted longer."¹⁹ Read one way it's a founder's last words. Read more sharply, what he's mourning is that he didn't have the leverage to negotiate with Yahoo back then — couldn't hold onto a power switch nobody else could flip.

Once the switch was actually flipped, in December 2016, ETtoday reported on a scene that recurred every year from then on: users opening ten-year-old blog links and seeing blank pages, 404s, their own vanished youth²⁰. This is past the scale of personal memory; this is a whole generation's lost ground. High-school love letters, first-love photos, complete college-club album sets — all parked inside a Yahoo internal meeting record, where some product manager ran the traffic numbers, the revenue numbers, the maintenance costs, and signed off. The instant that signature happened, the youth of more than two million Taiwanese became a single delete line on an internal KPI spreadsheet.

What's sharper is that those users didn't own the option of "export." Wretch's photo albums had no official backup tool, no batch download, no take-with-you ZIP. Yahoo did briefly offer a moving tool before shutdown, but its destinations were Tumblr or Pixnet — one was another American company, the other was local but later changed hands several times. Moving is never going home. It's switching landlords and continuing to rent.

Taiwanese plurk, they don't tweet — how a local-friendly platform got walked past by the crowd

While Wretch was still around, on May 12, 2008, a Canadian-team-built microblog called Plurk went live²¹. Its timeline ran horizontal; it had a Karma system, gave you emoji and special features based on how active you were — a very Taiwan-flavored design sensibility, even though the team wasn't in Taiwan. Plurk grabbed the Taiwanese market before Twitter ever arrived, and grabbed it so thoroughly that "Taiwanese plurk, they don't tweet" became the stock observation of the online scene for those years²².

The numbers spoke. Around 2011, Taiwanese users were roughly 40.8% of Plurk's global traffic; by 2018 it was 74.6%²³. By the late period, Plurk had become a near-Taiwan-only microblog, with foreign users drifting away. From one angle this looks like a victory for Taiwanese engagement; from another — when a platform is increasingly Taiwan-only, it gets harder to raise the next round, harder to retain technical talent, harder to compete with global giants. Plurk didn't die. It stopped in place.

What stopped it had little to do with tech. It was crowds. In 2009, Taiwanese Facebook users numbered around 100,000; by year-end it had jumped past 5 million — 3.5 million of them because of a game called Happy Farm. On December 9, 2009, the traditional-Chinese version of Happy Farm launched, and Taiwanese started stealing vegetables on company time, getting up in the middle of the night at home to harvest, stealing each other's greens. The collective addiction turned Facebook from "the thing American students use" into something every demographic in Taiwan, from middle-aged to teenage, had an account on²⁴.

Happy Farm itself wasn't especially fun. It was a slow-paced, Flash-built vegetable game. But it did one thing Plurk hadn't: it made the social relationship something you paid for in gameplay. You steal my vegetables, I have to come comment on your wall; I want to see who stole mine, I have to log into Facebook; I want my friends to play, I have to drag them from MSN onto Facebook. Inside three months, Taiwan's middle-class mothers, civil-servant fathers, and high-school daughters were all pulled by a virtual vegetable patch onto the same social network.

Plurk had no answer. Its horizontal timeline, Karma system, emoji unlocks — for users, they were all still there. But the people around them were on Facebook, family on Facebook, coworkers on Facebook, and the social gravity got strong enough that for many, "what I write on Plurk gets read by nobody." A locally strong platform doesn't need to be defeated — it just needs to be walked past by the crowd. Plurk later took strategic Chinese investment in the 2010s, was acquired in 2016 by Malaysia's SEA Group, and is still alive today — but as a corner of Taiwan's internet that a few people stop by to visit, like an old relative²⁵.

"Did you steal vegetables today?": a foreign beast trades a patch of greens for three million people

Push the camera in closer. Look at what happened in the three years from 2009 to 2012.

In early 2009, Facebook's presence in Taiwan was minimal. The mainstream was Wretch, Plurk, PTT, MSN. Facebook was "that thing they say American college students use." Then Happy Farm arrived. Reports remember the scene: in offices, people sneakily Alt-Tabbing to hide Facebook behind Excel; alarms going off at 2 a.m. because "the tomatoes are ready"; coworkers' greeting morphing from "have you eaten" to "did you steal vegetables today?"²⁶

2010-2012 was Facebook's lock-in period in Taiwan. MSN was still around but already under pressure — partly because Facebook's built-in messaging was getting better, partly because MSN started crashing inexplicably, failing to log in inexplicably. Microsoft's strategy in this period was vague: MSN had no app, no mobile strategy, no clear product direction for competing with Facebook.

Then January 8, 2013: Microsoft emailed all users that MSN would shut down on March 15, except in China. The actual global migration date was April 8, 2013, the day MSN officially closed in Taiwan²⁷. Here a number has been repeated wrong for years: the common version is "300 million MSN users poured into LINE," but the reality is that Microsoft migrated about 100 million users to its own Skype — MSN's global all-time peak was around 300 million, but active users at the 2013 shutdown were about 100 million, and the default migration target was Skype, not LINE²⁸.

In Taiwan, though, the biggest beneficiary of MSN's death really was LINE. The reason traces back to June 23, 2011, the day LINE went global. LINE's official record states it 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 Japanese team's response to the 311 earthquake's "couldn't reach family" anxiety, mobile-first from day one, "for telling people you're safe" from day one.

From February 2012 onward LINE went into a hard Taiwan ad push starring Kwai Lun-mei (桂綸鎂) — a "phone calls and texts" piece, followed by a string of slice-of-life vignettes³⁰. It wasn't a single viral moment. It was something rare in Taiwan's media history: a foreign (Korean-financed, Japan-based) company pouring TV-plus-metro ads in dense rotation. In November 2012, LINE Taiwan crossed 10 million users³¹. MSN wasn't dead yet, and LINE was already bigger.

The instant MSN actually shut down in 2013, Taiwan's family groups, coworker groups, and mom groups had been running on LINE for over a year. Microsoft pushed users toward Skype, but Taiwanese simply didn't go — their friends, family, coworkers were all on LINE already. A messaging app built by foreign capital for a Japanese earthquake aftermath inherited the relationship network MSN left behind. In June 2014, LINE Taiwan Limited was formally incorporated in Taiwan³². By 2025, LINE had 22 million monthly actives in Taiwan, around 94% penetration³³. Taiwan is stickier on LINE than Korea (where LINE loses at home to KakaoTalk) or Japan (LINE's home court).

The eerie thing about this substitution: it looks like rational choice — easy to use, free, family is on it — but none of the steps were chosen by Taiwanese. Facebook used a vegetable patch to drag three million people off a local platform. LINE used a wave of post-disaster messaging design out of Japan to inherit the entire MSN generation. We didn't refuse, because there was no reason to refuse; but we didn't choose either, because we were never asked.

Look back at the four years from 2009 to 2013 — it's the most thorough "foreign capital sweep" in Taiwan's community history. Local Wretch, local Tomorrow Times, local BBS culture all retreated to the corners under two foreign waves: Facebook and LINE. That retreat had no TV debate, no referendum, no public discussion of any form. Two foreign apps' product decisions, on their own, determined what the social infrastructure of an entire generation would look like. When in 2024 we started talking about "digital sovereignty" and "data localization," we were just doing makeup homework on a silent war fought a dozen years earlier.

Locking public conversation into elder group chats

The first thing LINE did after taking Taiwan was privatize public conversation.

Wretch-era blogs were public, had RSS, had trackbacks, were indexed by Google. Facebook-era posts were marginally public — the inside-vs-outside-the-wall walls got thicker — but at least class reunions, clubs, and events still existed on Facebook in searchable form. By the LINE-group era, an entire community's conversation disappeared from search engines, disappeared from history, disappeared from anything an outside researcher could call up.

A 2024 investigation by The Reporter noted: "Misinformation and contested messages inside LINE groups — passed through neighborhood, temple, party, and civic-organization groups — produce social division, stigmatize specific groups, and reinforce polarization."³⁴ The point isn't "there's misinformation" — every platform has that. The point is the structure of "the group": it lets messages travel only inside a circle of acquaintances, lets messages get endlessly forwarded but be hard to rebut from outside, makes it nearly impossible for media or fact-checkers to penetrate. LINE groups have become an underground current of Taiwan's elections, public health, and social issues — and outsiders can't see the source, the speed, or the destination of that current.

Section 4.7 of LINE's Terms of Service spells out the logic bluntly: "An account on this service is exclusive to the individual. The user's right to use this service may not be transferred, lent to a third party, or inherited by a third party."³⁵ In plain English: when you die, your LINE account and every conversation in it die with you. The last things your mother said to you before she passed, the "good morning" cards your father sent you at the end, the chat logs with friends you've lost — none of them carry any legally meaningful right of inheritance. In the physical world, a letter, a telegram, a diary will be left to your family after you go. On LINE, those items' ownership rests with LY Corporation, not your descendants.

It's the quietest clause of the platform era. Nobody thinks about their own death while signing up for LINE. But thirty years of internet history has taught us this: you'll die, your passwords will die with you, your conversations will keep existing on some cloud server, and nobody will be able to read them anymore. Taiwanese entrust relationships of a lifetime to LINE, and never think about where those relationships go after we leave.

In the same period, PTT is still around. Its users are aging — MIC's Q4 2024 survey says PTT's mainstay sits in the 35-44 age band (27.8%), while 18-24-year-olds prefer IG (78%), Dcard (45.9%), and Threads (44%)³⁶. But PTT is doing something other platforms aren't: every post is still in search engines, every history is still citable, every controversy is still available to academics. PTT is the last fossil of a public sphere in Taiwan's social history — it hasn't grown, but it hasn't shut its history down.

During the 2014 Sunflower Movement, PTT was the most immediate broadcast station between students on the ground and the outside world. During the 2018 same-sex marriage referendum, the Gossip board was an arena of massive argumentative production. During the 2020 presidential election, long posts on PTT Gossip were treated as primary sources by political-communication academics. None of this happens inside LINE groups — not because nobody discusses politics in LINE groups, but because the discussion inside a LINE group doesn't exist beyond that group's 200 members. Whether a society has citable public conversation records determines what its memory looks like. Taiwan still has this living fossil, but it's the only copy.

There will never be another sole ruler

In 2011, Lin Yu-chin (林裕欽), a second-year NTU Information Management student, built the first version of Dcard³⁷. It started as a small tool that "draws one card per midnight and matches you with a stranger" and slowly turned into a college discussion board — then into the platform with the highest usage rate among Taiwanese women aged 18-24. In 2015 Lin formally established Dcard the company, turning the student project into a full product³⁸.

On July 5, 2023, Meta launched Threads. 5 million users in 6 hours, 100 million in 5 days³⁹ — the fastest-growing internet service ever, by some distance. Taiwan reacted just as fast. Similarweb's May 2024 measurement: average Taiwanese Threads session was 11 minutes 31 seconds, number one in the world, with the US at 5:12 and Japan at 3:06 in the same period⁴⁰. MIC's Q4 2024 survey marked another watershed: Threads' usage rate in Taiwan hit 17.5%, edging past PTT's 17.1% for the first time⁴¹.

But the "Threads passes PTT" headline isn't as simple as it sounds. For thirty years, every Taiwanese community migration had a sole ruler: PTT in the BBS era, Wretch in the photo-album era, MSN in instant messaging, Facebook in social networks, LINE in messaging. The 2020s version is different — platforms are scattered. Young people coexist on IG, Dcard, and Threads, each at 40-80% penetration, with no single platform able to swallow a generation the way LINE did⁴².

That scattering has a political meaning that gets missed. When your social life is spread across five platforms, you don't spend ten years on any of them — you put thoughts on Threads, photos on IG, gossip on Dcard, family chats on LINE, friend voice calls on Discord. Each platform gets a slice of you, not the whole. That sounds like progress in digital sovereignty — you're no longer locked to one platform — but it also means: when the next mass migration comes, no platform can take an entire generation's memory with it the way Wretch did. Because no platform owned the entire generation in one piece.

The price of "no sole ruler" is that Taiwanese users have sliced their time into five and parked the slices on five different foreign companies' servers. Threads is Meta's, IG is Meta's, LINE belongs to Z Holdings, Discord is Discord Inc.'s, TikTok is ByteDance's. Local platforms didn't even make it onto the battlefield this round. Dcard is arguably the local choice for the 18-24 female community, but its scale, its discursive influence, and its international footprint look a lot like late-2010s Plurk — strong, but walked past by the crowd.

On August 31, 2023, Xuite — Suiyiwo (隨意窩) — began its three-phase shutdown. The blog platform that had taken in Wretch refugees ten years earlier was now evicting users again⁴³. It wasn't news. It was a too-familiar scene. Taiwanese have moved house plenty of times. Every move someone is crying over an old blog, someone is climbing a wall to find a backup, someone gets halfway through a download before realizing the album links died a long time ago. Nobody asks why this happens every few years.

Whose power outlet is your youth plugged into

On March 19, 2025, a fan opened an account on Threads called @wretch_1999, with a profile bio reading: "★●○● Welcome to Wretch ●○●★ / Total visits: 0000520 / Who came by my place / ♪♫ Background music: 5566 - I'm Sad ♪♫"⁴⁴. The posts read: "When is someone going to notice me? Come back to life," and "If nobody finds me… looks like it's about time to close the station again."

This account is fan-made, not official, not Yahoo bringing Wretch back, not a technical reconnection of the 2013 power switch that got turned off. It's a 2025 Taiwanese using Threads — Meta — to simulate the Wretch interface of 2005, including the "total visits 0000520" of that era, the "who came by my place" visitor log of that era, the "background music plays automatically" of that era. What he's simulating isn't just a UI; it's an entire generation's memory of "having a corner of the internet that was mine."

But this seance is plugged into Meta's power outlet. The day Threads gets its power switch flipped the way Wretch did (this isn't a question of whether, only when — thirty years of history has answered that already), @wretch_1999 disappears too. A seance collected by another instance of lost ground.

This is the shape of Taiwan's thirty-year online-community history. From BBS to Wretch, from Wretch crowded onto Facebook, from Facebook retreating into LINE, from LINE peeking out at Threads — each move parks the previous generation's memory behind a power switch someone else can flip. We log the world's number-one 11-minute-31-second session time on Threads⁴⁵, which means we put the most time, the most photos, the most conversations into the most precarious rental. When the next mass migration comes, none of that is in our hands.

Tomorrow Times Personal News Stand is still alive today because of the 2001 users' self-help committee⁴⁶. Wretch died on December 26, 2013 because there was no self-help committee to block Yahoo's decision. The difference between those two events has nothing to do with technology, capital, or business model. The key is whether users were treated as owners. For most of these thirty years, the answer has been no.

The next time someone asks you, "Why back up your photos? Why save your own blog? Why remember a password you once used?" — you can tell them the story of @wretch_1999. A 2025 Taiwanese, on Meta's servers, missing the Wretch that Yahoo shut down, simulating the youth of 2005. Every link in that chain belongs to someone else.

"If nobody finds me… looks like it's about time to close the station again."⁴⁷ He probably wasn't joking when he wrote that. Thirty years in, we still haven't learned how to own our own things.

Further reading

• Wretch — A Youth Parked on Someone Else's Power-Switchable Server
• PTT — The City-State That Grew Out of the Academic Network
• Facebook in Taiwan
• Threads in Taiwan — Threads and the 11:31 Average
• Instagram in Taiwan
• Miin — The 2026 Refuge of "Let's All Go to Miin"

References