they told me the internet was forever
🔗 a linked post to
samsharp.ca »
—
originally shared here on
In thinking about protecting the past, I'm grateful to Brennan Brown for their post, "How are we preparing for the Long Web?," a great introduction to the web-preservation movement that's unfolding right now. I like that the tone of the post is mostly hopeful - it poises us as readers embarking on a project through time, a thought experiment into the future.
Personally, I find frameworks like React to be neat from a developer's perspective and obnoxious from nearly every single other metric.
I'm sure at some point I'll have cause to meaningfully invest time in learning a fancy Javascript front end framework, and maybe I'll eat my own hat. But boy, as the old man in the room, I have a hard time accepting that the benefits of a front end framework outweigh the downsides of increased pipeline complexity, page size, and third party dependency attack vectors.1
I say all that because I feel like React made the web more inhospitable. It's harder to archive. It requires browsers to require even more resources. It's just... greedy.
They point to some stats that highlight just how much has been lost over the past few years, one of the worst ones being that over 66.5% of links published in the last nine years are dead. Nine years. The stats can only be more devastating if we go back twenty. Brown's post hones in on the ways that digital history is disappearing & puts together a great list of the ways that webmasters and archivists can make their sites as future-proof as possible, namely by sticking to HTML/CSS3 & updating one file, not thousands. I won't re-hash Brown's entire post, but I bring it up here as an example of the ways that the decay of the internet is being stalled and how everyday webmasters are fighting back against it.
This post inspired me to go through my own links and do what I can to preserve the contents of them.
So I vibed up a feature that loops through all 700+ of my links and checks to see if they are still alive.
The results? Of the 626 links that were checked, my script couldn't access 83 links.
Of the 81 YouTube videos I've shared, six are broken.
Looking through the list of broken links made me realize I should do some more weeding around here.
Mostly I need to cut the links to topical hot takes. Sure, it was fun to dig on Sony for hiking the price of some Whitney Houston music hours after her death. But I don't need to remember that forever, right?2
