News: Txti.es is shutting down July 1st

[shevek]

Hey, since we are all interested in niche spaces and site hosters as well as aspects of the small web, I thought I'd share. Actually I wanted to share it on Monday but alas..

Txti.es is shutting down. You might know it from the motherfuckingwebsite .. meme? Don't know how to describe it, but it was made by Barry T. Smith and it spawned several other sites developing the joke further, like best motherfucking website or the best motherfucking website. You see these sometimes in link lists on neocities.

Txti.es intended to provide fast, free, and ad-free web pages for everybody, no matter how slow the device or internet connection, so they could both read and share content without being excluded because of their connection. The idea was inclusivity and acknowledging that people all over the world still have trouble accessing the internet reliably.

Sadly, issues already started to emerge in 2020, when the owner considered giving the project away because fixing some errors within txti was difficult after years of being out of web development. Now, malicious actors have apparently used txti to create phishing sites or other questionable content, and it seems like the risk and time involved with this project is not worth it anymore, especially for one person behind it all.
What also sucks is that archive.org limits archiving of pages to 10k, so only 10k pages of txti can be saved (if their owners do not save them otherwise).

I think this is an important reminder that the web spaces we all rely on can be gone pretty suddenly; people become busy, get sick, die, or the cost (personal or financial) becomes too high. The smaller services crafted with love in spaces similar to this one can be misused and attacked too. And I've been pretty disappointed with online archiving lately; my internet archive browser extension never works, websites get saved in a broken way or not at all, things get deleted from the archive for no discernible reason, archived browser games do not work because of flash.. it feels like internet archiving is spectacularly failing many times, not to mention the lawsuits. Now I find out about the 10k limit..

[Melooon]

I didn't know about this site, but this is sad news! I gathered some arching resources over here that might help with your download limit!

Although usually to archive a host like this, you would need a list of all the sites hosted on the service (since you cant download a site if you don't have a link to it!)

[Gans]

Next options for the first "I have my own website on the internet" experience?

Vistaserv?
https://vistaserv.net/
Neocities?
https://neocities.org/

[lime360]

Next options for the first "I have my own website on the internet" experience?

Vistaserv?
https://vistaserv.net/
Neocities?
https://neocities.org/

vistaserv has a very broken site editor so neocities will be the next option

[shevek]

I've seen other people mention rentry.org/.co (leads to same thing) as an alternative they will use now. It seems like txti was used as more of a minimal thing than neocities, no design just markdown; a little like smol.pub that just has gemtext, and a bit more permanent and curated than pastebin. There are apparently people who keep journals, blogs and other stuff on pastebin, which I find weird but funny, and ones who do so on github. Different than having your own site, but those were the things mentioned.