In the late 1990s America Online sold the internet as a contained world. You dialed a number, typed a screen name, and landed inside the service: mail, chat rooms, member directories, everything framed by keywords. AOL Hometown, launched as “Hometown AOL” in October 1998, gave subscribers a plot of land in that world. The name mattered. These were not websites you owned; they were pages you kept inside an access provider’s community, at an address the company chose for you, visible to whoever else lived on the service.
A homepage inside the walled garden
AOL had hosted member pages before Hometown, first as two megabytes of space per username at members.aol.com and home.aol.com, built with AOLpress or Personal Publisher. Hometown replaced that with twelve megabytes, a directory of topics, and two click-through builders, “1-2-3 Publish” and “Easy Designer,” so publishing took no HTML at all. Every page belonged to a screen name, the same credential used for mail, chat, and the buddy list. The scale was enormous: an estimated eleven million sites by 2001, a new one added every eight seconds, and roughly fourteen million by 2002.
Residents met each other by screen name
On AOL, the screen name was the identity, and the homepage was its public face. People who met in a chat room or swapped messages on a board could click through to each other’s pages, where guestbooks, hit counters, and link lists pointed back to more member pages. Navigation was by keyword, the same mechanism that moved people through the whole service; the “MyPlace” keyword, for instance, was where members uploaded their own HTML. Readers found authors through the member directory instead of search engines. A “hometown” page was meaningful mostly in context — it described the person you already knew by screen name.
The closing notice
On September 30, 2008, AOL’s People Connection blog posted the announcement under the title “We’re Closing Our Doors”: as of October 31, Hometown was shut down permanently. That left a little over a month. Hometown had absorbed pages AOL acquired from other services — CompuServe, Netscape, AcmeCity — so some content was older than the platform itself; one longtime user complained that the deletion erased a site that had survived, in one form or another, for more than seventeen years. The shutdown also angered Jason Scott, who wrote “Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse” about what was lost and went on to found the volunteer Archive Team, which began organizing around exactly this kind of mass deletion.
The people outlived the pages
The community did not die with the server. Most residents had already drifted to free hosts and, later, to social networks; by 2008 much of Hometown’s audience was gone, and the people themselves were never AOL’s property. What the shutdown destroyed was the public record and the addresses. The Internet Archive still holds snapshots of many member pages, but the working link that a person had signature-blocked into chat posts and profiles simply stopped resolving. For members, that was the real loss: the street address inside the provider’s world, the page that had made a screen name findable, and the accumulated pages tied to an identity were removed at once. The friendships moved to other networks. The hometown did not.