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A million ways to die on the web
- zoobab 3y agoLoosing memory is an issue, the question is how to maintain the archive?
- k__ 3y agoThere are a few solutions: https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.arweave.org/ https://www.lighthouse.storage/ https://www.lighthouse.storage/ To me, they seem like the most useful stuff coming out of the blockchain industry.
- hexage1814 3y agoTough true? By preserving it yourself.
- pabs3 3y agoHave ArchiveTeam save it to archive.org and donate to keep the service alive.
- hyperluz 3y agoMy yahoo e-mail account was Yahoo-ed (one day, I logged in on it to find Yahho deleted all my e-mails (some of then important and others of sentimental value), due to account inactivity for a new arbitrary number of days not previously informed.
- Erratic6576 3y agomy geocities account was destroyed, putting an end to my career as webmaster. I grew a resentment towards that website
- AznHisoka 3y agoIncidentally my angel fire site is still up for some insane reason
- tetris11 3y agoI fear this for my gmail. I now use mbsync (lieer[0]) to have my emails synced locally on my homeserver, and then browse it with notmuch[1]. It's an incredibly freeing experience to have all your email on your own machine. 0: https://github.com/gauteh/lieer https://github.com/gauteh/lieer 1: https://notmuch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/man1/notmuch.html https://notmuch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/man1/notmuch.html
- girishso 3y agoFor the exact same reason I started using MacOS Mail app with gmail, but I am realising now that it doesn’t download “all” the emails unfortunately. Lieer looks like a good option, thank you.
- tetris11 3y agoIt's a great tool, it's just agonizingly slow sometimes because Google likes to throttle the connection when you make big changes. The initial download especially is slow, but the small changes thereafter are pretty fast.
- throwaway167 3y ago+ Politically regulated out. The political environment the site operates in turns hostile to website content or method of publishing. The operators face costs of compliance, loss of scope, or personal risk in continuing. See: The UK Online Safety Bill [1] [2] and especially [3] "Ofcom's >1,500 page consultation on the Online Safety Act 2023, and why small companies don't have a chance" [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23922397/uk-online-safety-bill-law-passed-royal-assent-moderation-regulation https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23922397/uk-online-safet... [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/uk-government-knows-how-extreme-online-safety-bill https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/uk-government-knows-ho... [3] https://decoded.legal/blog/2023/11/ofcoms-%3E1500-page-consultation-on-the-online-safety-act-2023-and-why-small-companies-dont-have-a-chance/ https://decoded.legal/blog/2023/11/ofcoms-%3E1500-page-consu...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- livrem 3y agoThey forgot one: Natural disaster deleted all the data and there was no backup. I was a paying subscriber to a great little site called magweb ~20 years ago. They scanned old and new (military) history and (war) game magazines and posted HTML versions, with permission of original publishers. It was really nice and explicitly allowed users to print or save copies of articles. No DRM. Perfect example of how a site for reading magazines online should work. Everything just basic HTML that even worked great to read in phone browsers 20 years ago. Then Hurricane Katrina hit and the server that was apparently running out of the owner's basement somewhere in that area was flooded, with no working backups. I still have not found any traces of most of the 40000+ articles, other than the few I had saved, that used to be on that site. Since it was paywalled only a tiny part of the site is available on the wayback machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20050529083811/http://www.magweb.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050529083811/http://www.magweb... (No, I can't imagine running a business and scanning magazines for 9+ years and not make sure to have backups of everything.)
- Hamuko 3y agoThere was also the OVHcloud data centre fire in 2021, although it's debatable if it'd fall under the same "natural disaster" category. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-ordered-to-pay-250k-to-two-customers-who-lost-data-in-strasbourg-data-center-fire/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-ordered-...
- achairapart 3y agoI know at least one startup that closed its doors because they lost both production and backup data on that OVH data center.
- Snow_Falls 3y agoAnd that's why 3-2-1 specifies to have one _offsite_ backup
- dspillett 3y ago
- forgotmypw17 3y agoThere's also giving up in protest of a lawsuit, one of the oldest causes: >Altern.org is a free web hosting service created in 1992 by Valentin Lacambre and disappeared in 2000. From its origins to the closure, Valentin Lacambre, a pioneer of Free Internet in France, had to permanently close the free hosting service in early July 2000 following numerous lawsuits. This closure was due to the laws of the time, which placed the delicate obligation on hosts to act as judge, censor, and, by default, guilty, as it was deemed difficult and contrary to his principles to control the 21,893 sites that existed on Altern.org at the time of closure. http://yavista.com/98/1f/981fa5fe.html http://yavista.com/98/1f/981fa5fe.html https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altern https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altern (Valentin Lacambre went on to be a co-founder of Gandi.net.)
- diggan 3y ago> (Valentin Lacambre went on to be a co-founder of Gandi.net.) Gandi.net which recently (last year) was purchased by some other corporate entity and subsequently raised all the prices + made previously free features paid. I only mention this as I discovered this week that my Gandi bill suddenly got a lot bigger.
- guitarlimeo 3y agoYeah I'm in the process of migrating away because of it. Sigh. Gandi had a good run.
- diggan 3y agoSame here :/ Saw the writing on the wall when the previous purchase/sale happened to some investment company or whatever it was, but thought I could hold off my migration for a while longer...
- veeti 3y agoIt appears their "no bullshit" slogan is gone.
- profsummergig 3y ago
- inopinatus 3y agoThere is a tale - perhaps apocryphal - handed down between generations of AWS staff, of a customer that was all-in on spot instances, until one day the price and availability of their preferred instances took an unfortunate turn, which is to say, all their stuff went away, including most dramatically the customer data that was on the instance storages, and including the replicas that had been mistakenly presumed a backstop against instance loss, and sadly - but not surprisingly - this was pretty much terminal for their startup.
- gonzo41 3y agoThat's like a gamma ray burst hitting the planet and just vaporizing it. So unlucky. But obviously fate had other ideas.
- sidibe 3y agoNot really with spot instances it was just waiting to happen on a day with more demand than usual. That is 100% expected
- sethammons 3y agoMore like a balancing rock statue in an area that can have earthquakes
- HPsquared 3y agoCommon mode failure.
- BossingAround 3y agoHow..? Was there no local code on any of the dev machines? No git? I'm asking because for example if Github is vaporized today, my product would lose roughly a day or two's worth of work, since we have like 30 computers having a repository copy. Of course redeploying every single thing would not be seamless because of course, there might be some configuration stored in services, or something similar, but I'd say that ~90% of our automation is stored in Git.
- 3y ago
- weinzierl 3y ago"Associated data" is a point I would not have immediately thought of. As data becomes more and more connected and services consolidated this becomes more important to consider.
- omnibrain 3y agoI hosted my first personal website and my Star Treck (sic!) fansite on Tripod. At some point in time they also had a data loss and one of both (along with a lot of other sites) was gone. This is not mentioned here https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Tripod https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Tripod because I think the event precedes Archive Teams formation.
- 101008 3y agoTripod and Lycos were great for kids who were learning HTML and wanted to have their own website. I remember the annoying popups and then banner frames, and how I tried to copy and paste a lot of JS to remove them (so unfair for them, they were providing a free service!)
- RamblingCTO 3y agoWait giphy was bought by meta? What a shame! And they don't sell it off, as they're supposed to? How doesn't it surprise me. A lot of the web feels like being destroyed by FANG. And Andreesen goes on claiming that the market prevents monopolies ...
- blatherard 3y agoMeta bought Giphy in 2020, then the UK CMA ruled that it was anti-competitive, so Meta sold Giphy to Shutterstock last year.
- RamblingCTO 3y agoYou're right! I read (in the original article?) that it wasn't completed yet, but it was: > The acquisition was completed on June 23, 2023.
- rvnx 3y agoVCs in one hand have successful companies (that generally IPOs), and losers on the other hand. They can use their influence on the people who having voting rights, to actually push the hot-potato to public investors. That's one big reason why you public companies purchasing somewhat useless companies, or acquihiring them at insane valuation.
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoIt's a shame that none of substitutes for DNS seem to have gained any traction so far. Renting names that serve as resource identifiers, locators and trademarks all at the same time is just not a good idea.
- dirkc 3y agoI'd add "maintenance burden". I have a few old properties I'm responsible for that used to be web apps, one is archived as static HTML, the other one still exists as an outdated web app. Every other week I receive a request to delete user data. At some point it might make sense to pull the plug on everything :(
- pabs3 3y agoPlease do let ArchiveTeam know before you pull the plug so at least the public data can be saved.
- thih9 3y agoDigged - via website redesign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Redesign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Redesign
- rvba 3y agoInteresting that the article does not show digg, which killed itself. On a side note, the current form of digg is interesting, yet somehow poorly done. Go there, sort by year: get only things from 2024, since no way to get 2023 or a rolling year. Not to mention being able to choose all or certain time periods
- probably_wrong 3y agoThe current Digg is doing its best to destroy the goodwill they collected with the slightly-less-current Digg. I started going there regularly about a year and a half ago, mostly because they would feature articles that I wouldn't find in my other typical websites. But in the last six months they have been optimizing to death, cutting anything that's not an instant success and publishing variant after variant of anything that's mildly successful (yay, another article on Twitter memes!). Clickbait titles are there too, along with a new-ish comment section that's 90% spam. It's been a sobering lesson on what happens when you put growth above everything.
- DamnInteresting 3y agoOn another side note: I have been running an interesting link recommendation feed for many years now, and evidently in ~2018 someone curating links for Digg found my feed and started relying on it heavily to populate Digg's front page. It went on for months. Some days as much as half of the links I posted would subsequently show up on Digg, including links to unusual and old content (which was a strong signal that the overlap was no mere coincidence). In 2019 Digg posted a job listing for a links curator, and I cheekily applied, noting that I'm already doing the job anyway, so they might as well pay me for it. They didn't take me up on it, but like magic, the poaching went away.
- rvba 3y ago
- doublerabbit 3y agoSuppose not full kill, but moderation Habbo Hotel: It was marked that sexual predators were using the service to groom and instead of tackling the issue, they applied a worldwide mute. You could walk but not talk. Habbo still exists, but almost killed the whole fanbase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo#Moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo#Moderation And that, you required Shockwave.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoThere's also "Sea Change," where a Web site that was one way, changes to become another way. An example is BBSpot.com. It's still up and going, but very different from many years ago. I miss SatireWire. I think it's dead now (ERROR ESTABLISHING A DATABASE CONNECTION).
- flyinghamster 3y agoThat happened to mp3.com as well - it was once a Bandcamp-like site, until it was acquired by CBS Interactive after a disastrous music locker service got it nuked from orbit by the RIAA. It's now, for all practical purposes, a parked domain. I still have a CD-ROM from them (back then, everybody and his brother published a CD-ROM).
- daniel31x13 3y agoThis is one of the main reasons I created Linkwarden - an open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and preserve webpages: GitHub: https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden Website: https://linkwarden.app https://linkwarden.app
- qingcharles 3y agoI'm frustrated by the fact there are zero archives out there of TwitterX, Instagram or Facebook. Even big brands have shuttered their accounts and now none of their content exists anywhere any longer.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoBrowsing into my 'Dead Bookmarks' folder, most of the links were either websites without enough funding to keep the servers online, acquired startups, or streaming services that were killed off by the giants' lawyers. Bash.org is the latest to experience the drag and drop of death.
- archerx 3y agoOh no! I just lost CG Society and now bash.org is dead? I feel like all the places teenage me used to hang out are all dying out slowly and its sad because those days we believed everything on the internet is forever.
- drewzero1 3y agoThe stuff you want to delete from the internet (embarrassing photos, bad takes from a decade ago) are forever, but the ones you want to keep (great hangouts, cool personal webpages) are fleeting.
- declaredapple 3y agoThis is the difference between security vs archival perspectives. For security you should assume someone recorded it indefinitely. For archival you should assume nobody recorded it including the original creator.
- drewzero1 3y agoI wish I could've put it so well myself!
- dredmorbius 3y agoWhen did B.O. die? Best source I seem to find is an HN posting from 4 months ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37295238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37295238> AzureDiamond/hunter2: RIP
- NanoYohaneTSU 3y agoLook inside A Million Ways To Die. There isn't a Million Ways To Die.
- profsummergig 3y ago> teh futurez!1! It's a sad list. Even Google, after it acquired YouTube, forced me to change my YouTube login to a gmail account.
- urbandw311er 3y agoThis should be renamed “ten ways to die on the web”
- MaryGab 3y ago[dead]
- jdugek 3y ago[flagged]