Typepad is shutting down
49 comments
·August 27, 2025evanelias
jjice
I initially thought that the 30ish day notice was too low, but that definitely softens it.
dazzaji
Wow - I'd forgotten all about this but just realized I have posts from an entire phase of earlier professional life - topic by topic and event by event - on an old blog there. Amazingly the browser remembered my login so I was able to find the URL. It's been quite a trip down memory lane revisiting some of the posts. Not sure I need to keep any of that published but I'll at least scrape and store it somewhere for old times sake. Maybe I'll find some buried gem of an idea when I scan them during the great scrape. Or - optimistically - perhaps a future zillion-token context LLM will uncover some personal patterns that unleash deep and actionable insights. Irrespective of the measurable value, I just hate to see the old posts dissapear forever.
qingcharles
I just noticed they own blogs.com domain. That would have been worth a pretty penny at some point, maybe not as much now.
tiffanyh
Sad news.
Typepad brings backs fond memories of early personal "weblog", Web 1.0/2.0 era, Six Apart & Movable Type.
sandymcmurray
I think I used every Six Apart blogging tool and I loved Movable Type. It was a shame (for me as a user) when Ben and Mena sold the company.
adithyassekhar
They're using the phrases "deactivated" and "not available to you" a number of times. No mentions of "delete" or "removed" on the page.
jyunderwood
I was thinking the same thing. "Deactivated" is different from "deleted."
I’m not a customer, but in today’s world, I would actually prefer that when the service shuts down, all accounts and published data are destroyed. Just wiped completely. Otherwise, what are the odds that customer PII gets sold off and the service owner licenses the previously hosted posts and comments to an AI company?
scblock
September 30 is a pretty small window to migrate. Hopefully it's enough.
Alex3917
At least with LLMs, we can just write a query to migrate the export to whatever target format we want. The main issue is just breaking 20 years worth of inbound links.
_verandaguy
Was this somehow not doable without LLMs? It's trivial data massaging.
Alex3917
I mean with LLMs you just copy-paste in the input format of your new CMS and then upload your export file. Even if it only took 15 minutes before, it now takes 0 minutes.
jll29
> The main issue is just breaking 20 years worth of inbound links.
That is annoying indeed - it would be nice if the Web had some way to keep links eternally valid. But people didn't even manage Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to work beyond the death of the publishing companies that issued them...
Perhaps links could be auto-replaced to archive.org links if they ceased to exist?
cube00
It's too bad the LLMs will hallucinate and mess up the content while doing that migration.
qingcharles
I think the best way would be to get an LLM to write a script that would export/import the data, so it only writes the code, doesn't touch the data.
r0fl
How would one go about buying typepad??
Who would I contact?
jszymborski
Wiki says Newfold Digital (nee Endurance International Group) own it.
qq66
Lot of content here that will go down with the ship. Hope the Internet Archive will mirror it.
Terretta
For former MoveableType fans missing "the good old days" of CMS before headless CMS and the JAMstack took over the world, do take a look at:
omnimus
I think the progression people went trough is MoveableType > Textpattern > Kirby so if you want the “latest generation” of the simple server rendered CMS you might as well try https://getkirby.com
net01
They should provide an option to move to https://ghost.org/
jstummbillig
Kind of interesting that, with such an entrenched service that seems highly automatable, shutting it down is preferable to just keeping it running in maintenance mode or selling it.
hombre_fatal
Does anyone have convincing macro ideas about why blogging died? Or maybe a link to some high level historian insights of the era?
Like the days where it seemed like everyone maintained a Blogger site and wrote longer form content?
Maybe it's more because blogging was a fluke to begin with. Kind of like in my junior high (2002?) every kid had an online journal (Xanga) that died when we moved to sharing those thoughts on Myspace.
Maybe it could be seen is more of a ephemeral shared "mass-delusion" that we should maintain blogs and post our thoughts online about favorite topics. (Hmm, I think this seems very reasonable.)
But moving to social media doesn't seem to explain everything. People had long form blogs about all subject you could think of. And it's not like it was obsoleted by posting those thoughts on Facebook. Instead the idea of individuals posting their long (text) thoughts on hobby topics just seemed to almost die completely.
CalRobert
It still exists (Medium, etc) but the eyeballs are all on twitter, Bsky, TikTok, etc
empath75
What happened is that long form writing on the internet bifurcated into professional work and social media, and a lot of popular bloggers either became influencers or professional writers, and the 'casual' bloggers moved to social media, especially facebook. People switching to phones over computers also made reading long form text more difficult.
Blogging _seems_ like it was more popular in retrospect because for a while it was a large percentage of content _on the internet_, but the internet wasn't that popular at the time. Social media now absolutely dwarfs the size of any of the blogging sites even at their peak, and Substack and Medium are probably roughly the same size that the old blogging sites were.
They stopped accepting new users ~5 years ago, so it's hardly a surprise... but I'm still bummed to see this.
Even so, 22 years is a good run!