Machines can only remember what remains.

The popular story about the internet is that it remembers everything.
My experience has been the opposite.

Websites disappear. Forums vanish. Domains expire. Entire conversations fade away.

What remains becomes the record.

https://realityfragments.com/2026/03/10/machines-can-only-remember-what-remains/

#ArtificialIntelligence #InternetHistory #DigitalMemory #LinkRot #Technology
#writing

Lost Recipes

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://defector.com/lost-recipes

#Deprecation of #ArchiveToday on en #Wikipedia - RfC closed: immediate deprecation [1].

#Archiving #LinkRot #Archive_Today

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5

Bezeichnend, traurig oder einfach nur lustig, dass die schemaLocation des epicur-Metadatenformats (http://www.persistent-identifier.de/xepicur/version1.0/xepicur.xsd) zur Verwaltung persistenter Referenzierung (URN) jetzt ausgerechnet zu einem Online-Casino führt?

#persistentidentifier #metadata #linkrot

We've teamed up with Automattic to fight link rot on the open web. Check out the new Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer for WordPress. The free plugin preserves pages, redirects broken links to archived versions, and helps ensure the web keeps its memory.

“It’s very important that websites have a memory," said Alexander Rose of Automattic. "When links go dead, in effect, the truth goes dead—especially in the age of AI,”

Learn more ➡️ https://blog.archive.org/2026/02/04/inside-the-new-wayback-machine-plugin-for-wordpress/

#linkrot

#Development #Approaches
Snapshot testing to keep URLs cool · An automated way to prevent broken links https://ilo.im/16a4ml

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#Testing #Automation #URLs #LinkRot #Websites #Blogs #HTTP #Git #WebDev #Backend

Vanishing Realm

Every Friday, a script verifies all the links on this website. I usually check the results that evening, or sometimes during the day at work, and see which dead links I can fix.

Strangely enough, this week 3 links on “What the heck is a Hyperborea?” have dropped off the face of the net. I checked the rest of the links manually, and 2 more turned up broken sites with internal errors!

The first was easy. It’s an excerpt from the book, Arctic Dreams: Imagination And Desire In A Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez. I just pulled up the Archive.org copy, picked a sentence to search for… and found the same excerpt at another URL. (A classic college website issue: moving faculty pages from a specific server to a more general site.)

The other two that actually reported errors are both role-playing games. The MUD Darkwind has moved to its own domain. Epiphany: The Legends of Hyperborea is a little trickier. It’s missing from its publisher’s website, but there are references to it online. I figured I could link to the sourcebook at Amazon, or maybe to a review, but the most informative page I could find was on archive.org.

Now to the sites that lied and reported “200 OK” instead of an error code. One was a page describing Clark Ashton Smith’s book, Hyperborea. The site had a search box on the home page, making it easy to find the new location. (It would have been nice if they’d actually removed the old script instead of letting it break. A 404 or even a 500 would have helped me catch this earlier.)

That leaves a Conan reference site, which is shut down, the domain name listed for sale. I went looking and found a site with maps of the world in which Conan takes place, showing Hyperborea near Cimmeria.

It’s just odd that three links would vanish from the same page at more or less the same time.

Did you know that nearly 40% of web pages that existed in 2013 are already gone? Link rot is real, and the "cloud" is just someone else's computer that might be turned off tomorrow.

This is why self-hosting and local backups aren't just a hobby anymore - they're digital archeology. If you love a piece of information, save it. Don't assume the internet will remember it for you. That's why I'm building my NAS right now.

#SelfHosted #DigitalPreservation #Privacy #NAS #LinkRot #Tech #Internet

Link rot

https://voragine.net/link/link-rot