Internet isn't here forever

Content on the internet isn’t eternal. I think this is something I bring up quite often, but even then it never feels enough. These past few weeks I’ve been getting into Quintessence: The Blighted Venom, a game from 2006. How is that relevant? Well, I think its a good example of a victim to link rot and tides of time.

One of the biggest indicators is the download page - located on the Internet Archive. You were supposed to download it from Freebird games forum/website, but what about it?

The Freebird Games forum is dead. Around 2020 the website closed (with some features cut in 2019), seemingly taking all content with it. The community has been on Discord since 2019, so it wasn’t that big of a deal, but ever since the new (beautiful) website came online, our only references for forum threads and old games are snippets of the WayBack machine. There was so much history, whole friendships in that data! Apparently Quintessence was going open source at one point! And now… nothing. It’s all at the mercy of Internet Archive existing tomorrow, and who is to say it won’t go the same way the forum did?

This makes me think - how many other old sites out there died to a single failure? What awesome places on the web have we lost? They say that the internet “never forgets”, and yet there are countless blanks in the memory. Any time I stumble upon a functioning blog or forum from 90s or early 2000s I find myself just browsing it and admiring the living history in front of me. Because it won’t be here forever.

There isn’t really a moral to this story, except back up your data. If you can, host it yourself! Don’t trust Google, Discord, or somebody else to keep it safe for you. Services can and will die. MySpace was an influential social media, yet many people from my generation (including myself) barely heard of it. It is naive to think the current giants will be any different.

As for me, I will be trying to build a personal archive soon. I only have ~3tb usable between my servers, but should be enough for some RPG Maker games and pictures (and I can always expand). I want to be sure that even if the web died tomorrow - which with the AI boom may very well happen - I could migrate my blog posts, re-read interesting articles, and re-play nice games. It could be an interesting undertaking to retrieve some part of Freebird forum and bring that back as a “fun project”, but there is probably even more data in Discord (a proprietary format) by now, which makes it feel futile.

…I also need to finish Quintessence, solid game so far.