The internet is slowly dying. I wish we could just say "it was, but then archive.org and other archives showed up", but turns out that now sites like TV Tropes, deviantArt, Twitter and Reddit are losing content for one reason or another. Only some of their content can likely be saved at this point.
Links rot over a period of 20 years, until almost nothing is left. ARPANET is gone, except a handful of records about how the first node was created in the 1960s. BBSes of the 80s are gone. The 90s, the dawn of the World Wide Web, is nearly absent, and so is most of the Turn of the Millennium.
Now we're seeing the disappearance of information from as little as 5 years ago, because sites are being targeted by people who want the information on them gone. Many, many websites have been destroyed because they refused to self-archive, and with the sole exception (thankfully) of Wikipedia, nobody on the internet is completely publicly archiving everything.
From the efforts of egotistical PC gaming modders for games like Transport Tycoon who took and continue to take down their mods out of spite for the actions of a few community members, to governments bringing down tvlinks.cc and then MegaShare, to the hacker who apparently deleted y!gallery, to the dumbing down of Google searches to only provide three pages before no more results are shown, content is being lost every day for reasons that are far from justifiable.
Attacks on the internet as a whole - both successful and unsuccessful - like TWEA, CDA, COPA, DMCA, DOPA, SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, CISA, FOSTA-SESTA or the EARN IT bill; all in the USA alone - are an almost yearly occurence. Hitting closer to home for sh.itjust.works, Bill C-10/C-11 is just one Canadian bill attempting to "kill" the internet within the country.
I do see a light at the end of the tunnel, however. Plugins like Archiveror for Firefox, and systems like Zotero for saving research to a local or cloud storage, make it easy to back up everything you want to find but cannot trust to a bookmark alone. Web Archive Viewer is useful for viewing such archives easily. Perma.cc allows you to keep links indefinitely even if you stop paying your subscription (IIRC), but restricts how many links you can make permanent per month based on subscription level.
So please, if you see this, and think of or find something you see on the internet that you want to preserve, make the effort to do so! If you care, then someone else might as well. Then post a link here to share it with others.
I'll also provide this curated content for anyone wanting to learn more about the history and changing nature of the internet. If you see anything there that you want to stick around, please re-post it here and at least one place elsewhere to prevent it from being lost if Guilded no longer exists.
While we don't condone the archiving of immoral content, I will hold that only content that directly leads to/from an immoral act should be destroyed forever; if the "crime" is victimless, like online piracy of media which is not being circulated or recreational drug use, it should not have to be purged from the federation of lemmy/kbin just because governments say so; governments are partly to blame for this mess in the first place.
