FML (FMyLife)
"Today, [something humiliating happened]. FML." The confessional site where strangers shared their tiny daily disasters as one-sentence anecdotes, and you voted on whether their life truly sucked — or whether they totally deserved it. The three-letter sign-off outgrew the website and became everyday slang.
FMyLife launched on January 13, 2008, created by Maxime Valette, Guillaume Passaglia, and Didier Guedj as the English-language version of the French site Viedemerde.fr ("shit life"), which had already become one of France's top ten websites. The format was rigid and perfect: every post began with "Today" and ended with the letters "FML."
Readers voted on each anecdote — "I agree, your life sucks" versus "you deserved it" — turning other people's small misfortunes into a browsable, upvoteable feed of schadenfreude. It hit its stride in 2009, pulling more than 1.7 million hits a day after a surge that February, and became a fixture of bored-at-work and bored-in-class browsing alongside its spiritual twin, Texts From Last Night.
A book of collected posts followed on June 9, 2009, and mobile apps arrived across iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and more as the site spread into a handful of languages. "FML" outgrew the website itself, graduating into everyday shorthand for a bad day — three letters a whole generation still types without ever thinking about where they came from.
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