Before Facebook, There Was BlackPlanet

An alternative history of the social web

- By Hannah Giorgis

A few years ago, Stephanie Williams and her husband fielded a question from their son: How had they met? So they told him. They'd first encountered each other on a website called BlackPlanet.

To the 5-year-old, the answer seemed fantastical. "He clearly didn't hear 'website," Williams, a writer and comic creator, told me. "He was like, 'Wait, you all met on Black Planet? Like, there's a planet that's full of Black people? Why did you leave?!"

Williams had to explain that they'd actually been right here on "regular Earth." But in some ways, their son's wide-eyed response wasn't so off base: From the perspective of the 2020s, there is something otherworldly about the mid-aughts internet that brought his parents together. In a social-media era dominated by the provocation and vitriol of billionaire-owned mega-platforms, it can be hard to imagine a time when the concept of using the internet to connect with people felt novel, full of possibility—and when a site billed as the homepage of the Black internet had millions of active users.

Black Planet went live in 1999, nearly three years before Friendster, four years before MySpace, five years before Facebook, and seven years before Twitter. In those early years, the internet was still seen by many as a giant library-a place where you went to find things out. Sure, the web had chat rooms, bulletin boards, and listservs. But BlackPlanet expanded what it meant to commune-and express oneself online.