It had been so long since I’d really spent any time on Covenspace, but late last week I was check in quite a bit while working on an article about Pagan community online.  I remember when I started going to Covenspace a handful of years ago thinking that it was neat to see this whole “Myspace for Pagans”.  Though Ning launched in 2005, prior to Covenspace’s 2007 launch, it wasn’t until around the same time that Pagan social networks of all kinds started popping up because of Ning.  Now PaganSpace.net (not the be confused with PaganSpace.com which is vastly different) which is hosted on Ning, has over 27,000 members as opposed to the about 5,000 members on Covenspace when I looked last week.   Ning just made it so easy for people to create communities that attracted people that liked many of the features that Myspace offered but now they had the ability to have those features in communities aimed specifically at them. For independent site developers trying to go it on their own without the help of a service like Ning it can be a little harder to make some of these features available.

So after being over at Covenspace just a little over a week ago and all seeming well and then going there a few days ago I was surprised to see that the site was down.  So I waited, tried again, and it was still down.  Then there was a tweet from the Covenspace Twitter account on February 9th:

I went and took a look at the Myspace blog entry and it appeared the struggle to find and fix the problem was over and it was time to throw in the towel.  It is certainly a sad and unfortunate thing, but in her post Pythia said:

When I started Covenspace, there were NO other social networks for Pagans. I am proud to say that I was the first. Now there are dozens (hundreds) of them out there, though almost all of them are identical Ning sites. But they are there, and you can find more community now.

A temporary message board has been set up so users can post contact information, find friends from their page and so on in order to make sure that people are still able to keep in touch.  Another Twitter message a little later said that Covenspace members were starting to head to a site called Witchbook to connect.  This site is apparently brand new, stating on it’s website that it is still in the BETA stage, and according to Whois.net was only registered on February 8th.

All in all and interesting turn of events in the area of Pagan social networking from one of the first sites of it’s kind.

Added Edit 2/10/10

I signed up for an account on Witchbook and while the site is very sleek looking, it might be a little too soon to get too excited for it.  The site is definitely in its early stages and is lacking a couple big features that you come to expect from a networking site, mainly a forum area and/or discussion groups.  Hopefully things like this will be coming down the road with the site otherwise it seems interaction between members will be confined to a chat room, blogs and member profiles.  For people like myself that already have blogs elsewhere that might limit interaction a great deal.  With the date of the launch of Witchbook and the sudden demise of Covenspace, and Witchbook clearly still being in a fragile state, it seems like an even more interesting turn of events.