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Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

0.mk

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Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#31

Post by Levitating »

sumtechguy wrote: post #20
efskap wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving. We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing. Archive.org had incredible foresight and if it didn't already exist, I'd call such a project a pipe dream.

Even Archive.org is rather limited in what it keeps. I know of a very large site that recently disappeared. archive only has part of the web html part of the site. Everything else is either gone or non accessible.

That's not my experience

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#32

Post by reticulates »

hyperionultra wrote: post #9
tdx wrote: post #2

I found an old database backup of 0.mk on a disk I had kept. 0.mk started in 2009 as a passion project built by three of us. We worked on it for a few hours each week around our regular jobs. We eventually closed it in 2014 because the revenue (hint: no revenue) could not cover hosting, development, and the constant work of fighting spam and reviewing abuse. The recovered historical corpus contains 657,607 links. For…

How did you managed to obtain that domain? Usually single digit or letter domains are “reserved”.

They’re not reserved, pretty easy to obtain if you have money, starting from less than $1k.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#33

Post by dasil003 »

tokai wrote: post #7

Am I getting old? 09-14 is not even close to the old web for me. The old web, to me, was back when people still published physical 'phone' books for websites.

I vaguely recall those, but they were more for normies trying to get online. For me the old web is what I saw when I logged into my university gopher server and saw the advertisement for something called the World Wide Web which I could browse via lynx. Soon enough I got a PPP connection and then Mosaic/Netscape 1.0. However everything after javascript shipped (let alone CSS) is new new new. I'd almost go as far as saying if it doesn't have a tilde in the URL it's not old web... almost...

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#37

Post by stillpointlab »

bradley13 wrote: post #34

2009-2014? That's not the old web. Or I'm old. Take your pick.

I've just gotten used to this at this point. My first time on the web was somewhere around 1995 I think, although my first time on the Internet was earlier (it was a proxy through some ancient BBS and I'm pretty sure it was using gopher). Even though I was just a kid back then, clearly that makes me old now.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#38

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

nephihaha wrote: post #23
z_rho_one wrote: post #14

Remember the good ol' days when we all thought that everything on the web would exist for eternity and over.

No, that's just embarrassing stuff. That stays on the web forever.

Especially since the Internet is literally a _messaging_ protocol.

Re: Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

#39

Post by marginalia_nu »

efskap wrote: post #6
shevy-java wrote: post #5

Webpages dying is probably one of the biggest design flaws of the original web. I am not saying old content needs to be preserved forever, but so much content has factually been lost over time. Old logs from text-based MUDs for instance, even for MUDs that still exist today.

It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving. We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing. Archive.org had incredible foresight and if it didn't already exist, I'd call such a project a pipe dream.

> It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving.

This is a bit idealized. In practice copying data is not quite accurate (especially in bulk) and bit-rot is a very real phenomenon, both in flight and in storage.

You sometimes encounter it when dealing with files from the early '00s, it's very common to discover a few of them are corrupt, even if they've only ever been copied between harddrives.

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