Link rot, and how the Internet is dying

This is the post I teased. ;)

Methos is a bit younger than myself, having stated that his first computer as a kid was running Windows 95, but I believe he has a history degree, or was at least a history major, and is a civil war re-enactor. At ahcapella's suggestion, I started sharing some of my interest in computer history, and my collection, and how my goal is to open a computer museam and such, and Methos is apparently also into the retro-futuristic aesthetic, personified by r/cassettefuturism, which is not a Reddit I was aware of, so thanks for the link ;) There are also sites like the Vault of VHS tumblr, which are interesting in certain circles, I suppose, but not something you're likely to stumble upon unless you know exactly what you're looking for or, in my case, provided a link by someone whose interests overlap my own. (Also, there's a guy who does videos like this one where they watch and review mystery VHS tapes. The YouTube algorithm likely never would have put it in front of me, and I never would have known to look. But it's fascinating.)

He started bemoaning the fact that the Internet is dying, partially due to link rot, but also partially due to the commecialized nature of it, instead of the "wild west" that it used to be. Used to be that everyone end their mother, brother, uncle, etc, had a personal website somewhere, either on Geocities or some other free space, or with their ISP under their ~username folder. You could get lost for hours down one rabbit hole or another, just following links from someone's personal website. Some of those pages still live on the Wayback Machine at archive.org. The problem is, while sites like TheOldNet make it easy to access those old pages, if they exist, the search engines don't exactly show results for personal pages these days so there's no longer an easy way to just stumble across them.

I mentioned tilde club to him, which he found very interesting, and we discussed webcomics (thanks for the index, Methos!) as well, and conventions and fandoms and such. If it's packaged up as a nice, shiny commercial project, it'll rank on searh engines. If it's on a personal website, unless there are few other hits on the specific search terms, the algorithm which once saved us from blackhat SEO has made things worse for the rest of us who are not commecial entities.

Maybe this is why I'm so interested in resurecting the old ISP I used to work for, at least to some extent. There was such a wealth of information of the ~user sites on it which have been lost to time. I would love to recover what I can and restore the long-dead links. The current world wide web feels sterile and corporate. I miss the days where you could spend hours exploring links off of some randome page you stumbled upon. I want to restore at least a small slice of that.