suddenly feeling weirdly sad about old dead websites/forums

[glitterpigeon]

idk. this is probably cause im going through a lot rn and so my emotions are all weird but i'm just so sad about this right now? on a personal level and a sort of larger level, just how much stuff gets lost in the abyss of the internet. i grew up being taught in school and stuff that everything on the internet is forever, which I guess on the short time scale is kinda true, but when it comes to the things i'm interested it feels like the complete opposite?

and I have such strong feelings looking at old websites, looking at a dead forum overrun with bots to the point that it's unusable, the last few posts from humans all lamenting the problem, drowned in an ocean of nonsense. the internet feels so much less permanent than anything else and it's making me so sad right now. i probably can't even fathom how much stuff has been lost. there's a Jacob Geller video essay about libraries that kind of reminds me of this? the video talks about weeding, and how, though it's necessary-libraries and archives are physical spaces with finite resources and could not possibly hope to contain all the the books in existence- it's kind of sad.

every book is a part of someone's life, as rich and complex as our own, with passions and fears and loves, and most of them, so so so many of them will just be lost forever, and it makes me sad. I wish I could reach back into everyone's lives and see them, remember them, so that at least one person does. I think that's why Im so drawn to history and weird old abandoned websites and old musty books, because that is the closest I can get to that.

idk do other people get unreasonably sad when they look at old webisites for too long? how do you deal with those feelings? i think it's sort of connected to my weird existential fears to me, like if this thing didn't work out, if this thing was mostly forgotten, who's to say that I won't be any different?   

[CableCat]

how do you deal with those feelings? i think it's sort of connected to my weird existential fears to me, like if this thing didn't work out, if this thing was mostly forgotten, who's to say that I won't be any different?   

I get those feelings, too. That's part of why I got into making my own personal archives and data hoarding. I also try to make things with crafting and buy mundane objects that w3il outlast my lifetime.

On one extreme, I have the desire to collect and preserve. On the other, I know that eventually few things remain, and much is re-processed into something else. We're all human, we live, we experience emotion and consciousness, and then we die. We become something else!

But even still, there are things that have had the fortune of being preserved for thousands of years, or transformed while keeping their original "essence". Even people, like the mummies and ancient peoples of history.

I think in some ways it is a good thing that the internet is not as permanent as our teachers told us it was. It is long-lasting to some degree, and it definitely makes information about us more accessible. But it has also created communication and privacy crises, and we have a lot of questions to recon with as as technology advances faster than we were designed to experience as humans.

It's okay to be sad about impermanence. There's negatives and positives to it.

[nehnix]

I think it is a reassuring thought that while countless creative works on the internet are lost to time, the creativity and passion behind them remains. As long as humanity drives to express itself, the internet will remain a place to discover new and exciting things! 

[xixxii]

for me, i try to balance out that sad feeling by thinking of the internet as i do physical environments. rot and decay are a part of Online as much as Offline. the withering and dying of elements of any ecosystem are sad, but it's also essential and very normal!  after all, everything digital is physical at the end of the day!

and, similarly, in social environments it's good for things to be forgotten. i think forgetting things is an important aspect of being able to move on and grow. people's brains aren't meant to remember Absolutely Everything Forever. "what you put on the internet is forever" is something i heard a lot as a kid, too - but it was always a warning. it's not really a good thing about the internet, or something people like about it; permanence is scary, and i think every thing that falls off the internet is a relief to somebody.

just because something is gone doesn't mean it didn't or doesn't matter; the grief you feel is the proof of that. there are so many people in this world and we all together are shouldering the burden of remembering things; the things that you forget are remembered by someone else. no one person needs to be in charge of remembering everything. i try to at least feel sad in a sort of positive wistful way rather than a crushing-despair kind of way; there are whole lives and experiences and communities that are completely inaccessible to me that i will never know, and that's beautiful! it's wonderful to be reminded that the world is not as small as what is still around; it's infinitely larger. nothing will ever be entirely known or solved, there will always be more to learn and explore and grieve...


all that said, i have some hoarder tendencies and was very emotionally affected by that jacob geller essay you mentioned! (for anyone who hasn't seen it, here: how can we bear to throw anything away?) the impermanence of things makes me very sad a lot of the time. i lost a lot of the "stuff" that made up my (and my family's) life in a housefire when i was in college, things i can never get back - family photos and things that belonged to dead relatives and things i loved as a toddler - and have never found "it's just stuff" to be especially comforting, haha. especially as someone with a kind of bad memory.

it's okay to be sad. i don't think it's weird or unreasonable at all! losing things and feeling bad about it are important parts of life that everyone learns to deal with in their own time, that people have always struggled with. it's one of the most difficult things there is!!

but, you know, everywhere you go and everything you touch and everyone you meet leaves an imprint on the world, no matter how small it might be. you don't need to do anything more than simply exist in order to matter. the world is very interconnected in that way, and there's no way to quantify the ripple effect that your own existence has - except that it is, always, infinitely greater than zero.
even if you never interact with another human being ever in your entire life - bees remember, crows remember, the ground itself remembers.

also relevant: footprints from children playing in a puddle 11,500 years ago ; onfim's drawings ; graffiti from herculaneum and pompeii; a cat's pawprint on a medieval manuscript. normal things and normal people are preserved all the time - things forgotten can be remembered again - etc.

hope any of that is coherent at all, hahaha. it's something i think about a lot!

[DiffydaDude]

I have some strong opinions about this. I feel like this whole thing about things not lasting forever is starting to become obsessive. Like yeah, its sad when something like a forum or website dies, but why are we always worrying about the unfathomable amount of things getting lost online when we dont even know what was lost in the first place at that point. I feel like when we get to worried about this, we're just enslaving ourselves to our future selves so instead of actually enjoying the things now, we're always worrying about "what if me from 1 year in the future needs this" "what if someone 600 years from now needs this".

[moonunions]

idk do other people get unreasonably sad when they look at old webisites for too long? how do you deal with those feelings? i think it's sort of connected to my weird existential fears to me, like if this thing didn't work out, if this thing was mostly forgotten, who's to say that I won't be any different?   

maybe not unreasonably sad, but i do feel a sense of longing if i think too much about the past. you're valid for having those feelings, especially if there are good or fond memories attached to them. with how much the internet is now overrun with ads everywhere you go, i sometimes feel so... disconnected, i guess, when visiting social media. i also miss my friends who only use that as a form of communication. gone are the days of old journaling sites where people would write a tl;dr about their lives and not be confined to making several tweet threads. that doesn't have the same feeling as a blog post would imho.

however, the future will be full of new and fun things! and we're all here to try and preserve the old web, or at least find kindred souls to reminisce about it with. that's what gives me a positive spin for change on the internet, since we wouldn't all be here if things didn't gradually disappear. hang in there, i hope things look up for you soon!

[Absentmind]

Hmm can't say I particularly relate. I think you answered your own question within anyways. I think this is an extension of your existential fears being projected onto media, I think it's important to reshape your mindset.

I have some strong opinions about this. I feel like this whole thing about things not lasting forever is starting to become obsessive. Like yeah, its sad when something like a forum or website dies, but why are we always worrying about the unfathomable amount of things getting lost online when we dont even know what was lost in the first place at that point. I feel like when we get to worried about this, we're just enslaving ourselves to our future selves so instead of actually enjoying the things now, we're always worrying about "what if me from 1 year in the future needs this" "what if someone 600 years from now needs this".

I think Diffy hits the nail on the head perfectly here and I want to expand with my own story.

Years ago when I was pretty miserable with nothing much going on, I used to play Minecraft with an amazing bunch of people and they helped me through some pretty tough times. That Minecraft server is long gone and those people are distant memories to me now. Am I sad that the server is gone? No, Am I sad that I don't really speak to those people anymore? No. Because I remember how much fun it was then and how it happy it made me, but that is the past and the past is unobtainable. that moment has happened and is never happening again and I'm happy for it!

Point is, I think focus more the thought of  "it's had its time, it's had it's happy moments, people have have enjoyed its art and now it's over". Nothing in life is forever which is perfectly fine. that's why we need to cherish things in the present and not lament on the past, because the past is ultimately, dead. It's important to live in the now.

To end this with a corny quote "The reason it's called the present is because it's a gift" 


If you're having trouble with existentialism, I suggest reading about Japanese Wabi Sabi and Zen Buddhism. It's personally helped me a lot!

[DiffydaDude]

Hmm can't say I particularly relate. I think you answered your own question within anyways. I think this is an extension of your existential fears being projected onto media, I think it's important to reshape your mindset.

I think Diffy hits the nail on the head perfectly here and I want to expand with my own story.

Years ago when I was pretty miserable with nothing much going on, I used to play Minecraft with an amazing bunch of people and they helped me through some pretty tough times. That Minecraft server is long gone and those people are distant memories to me now. Am I sad that the server is gone? No, Am I sad that I don't really speak to those people anymore? No. Because I remember how much fun it was then and how it happy it made me, but that is the past and the past is unobtainable. that moment has happened and is never happening again and I'm happy for it!

Point is, I think focus more the thought of  "it's had its time, it's had it's happy moments, people have have enjoyed its art and now it's over". Nothing in life is forever which is perfectly fine. that's why we need to cherish things in the present and not lament on the past, because the past is ultimately, dead. It's important to live in the now.

To end this with a corny quote "The reason it's called the present is because it's a gift" 


If you're having trouble with existentialism, I suggest reading about Japanese Wabi Sabi and Zen Buddhism. It's personally helped me a lot!

Woah I had a pretty similar experience! I used to play Roblox with the most awesome group of friends on the Furry Assembly. But then I screwed up, and now those days are pretty long gone. Only difference is, I still have trouble getting over it! :( all i can really do is just be ironic about it which im getting kinda tired of

[Absentmind]

Woah I had a pretty similar experience! I used to play Roblox with the most awesome group of friends on the Furry Assembly. But then I screwed up, and now those days are pretty long gone. Only difference is, I still have trouble getting over it! :( all i can really do is just be ironic about it which im getting kinda tired of

You're young buddy, you're going to make mistakes and it's the best time to make them, it's important to just learn from them and move on!

[bby]

it really bums me out  when there was a site i visited a ton back in the day is not archived. or if it is archived, it's barely readable due to broken images and things like that. i have the internet archive extension so i can easily view a site's past.

although i feel that way about a ton of things, there are some things that i am glad is either really hard to find or not archived.

for example, i found an archived page not that long ago of a really old forum, and i about died when i found an old profile of mine. the thing about that though, nobody could have connected the dots back to me since i mostly lurked and didn't talk about personal info. so in a way it's not that devastating but just the fact that i know it's mine makes me want to hide in my imaginary turtle shell

i'm sure my old internet friends would probably feel similar about their old profiles that have been archived. but when i happen to see one of theirs, it makes me happy because i remember the good times. even if we lost contact, i would like to think there's at least one old internet friend who feels the way i do when i see our shared past.

i'm not sure how well i can explain this, but you know how people say funerals are for the living more than the dead? that's kind of how i'm trying to view my archived digital past. that person is dead: i retired that moniker, i've aged and my appearance has been modified, for the  most part i don't have the same beliefs and interests that i used to have. the me that's alive and making this post right now is worlds away different that the little teenager's web page that's been digitally preserved. and while it will probably always make me die a little bit of embarrassment at how much i've changed, that's the thing. i changed, which is a good thing. i am not the same person i was a decade or longer ago.

i think i got a little caught up in my emotions and veered pretty far away from the original topic, so sorry about that! just something i've been thinking about for a while now and never had the chance to put it into words.

[Dreamwings]

This sort of thing is honestly why I've stayed away from lost media communities and such like the Lost Media wiki and Lost Media YT. I used to be super fascinated by it, absolutely enamored and wanted to know about all of the missing things. But after a while it started to grow on me about all of these missing things that would never be found again, or we didn't even know existed. And yet people would go on and on and on as though they were there, they were real, they just had to find them. And then theoretical lost media began to be officiated and taken seriously at some point on there because yknow, wiki and just... It really started devloving into looking for anything and everything, even things that don't exist (alternate timeline like "But what if this old version that never made it past pre-production WAS made! Lost mediaaaaa"), things that couldn't possibly exist because they were completely destroyed and were SHOWN to have been completely destroyed, or things with so little evidence they existed at all.
With the things that do have a possibility of existing at least, just never found, a feeling of hopelessness eats at you as time goes on. Even moreso if somehow you were around for the thing's existence and could have preserved it but didn't for some reason (like being a child).
But even when avoiding lost media hunting communities, I still find things like it. Old games, sites, forum posts, people who came and hung around for so long and then just disappeared without a trace, art made by people for one another of their characters together that both disappeared, things like that. I wonder about those people sometimes, what they were like, who they were. It's like finding an old perserved letter in isolation; without the writer or the recipient, but mentioning one another and maybe other people.
"The Internet is forever" is somewhat true, but only in certain ways really. That thing that gets preserved forever tends to have to be something particularly noteworthy or at least noticed by people to be preserved. But sometimes things aren't. Sometimes things disappear into dust. I have seen that happen too many times to count. Things I am looking for that just cannot be found, wayback machine or otherwise.
2024 is a year of lost media, actually. There have been an absolutely record breaking amount of things disappearing just in this year alone and it's not even over yet. Major public things and smaller niche things. And not only that, but a few of my projects as of late unfortunantely intertwined with it, which caused me to get into the same sort of self-hating, existencial, death-fearing state you're mentioning right now. But I tend to solve it for myself by thinking about this.... not that it would nessicerily help for you because I don't know you but whatever, it's relevant
Maybe things don't even need to be preserved. Historically it would be nice and all but I mean... If it is impossible, if there is literally nothing we can do, then maybe we just shouldn't. Maybe we should just let it go, let it be lost, and stop caring. Like, sure if it was found, then keep it. But otherwise, just think of the memory of it if you have one. If you don't, then leave it alone. It's dead and gone.
After all, think of all the dead people in your local cemetery. You don't know anything about who they were, what they were like, etc. Maybe they were really interesting people, maybe they were just a regular person, maybe they were a really shitty person. And think about all the other dead people throughout history who are so long gone their graves are gone. Trillions upon Billions of people, of lives, of stories, of creation in one way or another. And all of that is gone too. If we were to cry and search for every single thing that has been created by human hands over all of history, we wouldn't get anything done. Because 99% of it has been reduced to ash and the bits that haven't are already in museums. And that is very, very small.
We're fortunate enough honestly to be able to keep as much as we have right now. It is absolutely unprecidented in all of human history. And it is best to appreciate what we have than what we do not.
Also, datahoarding can be functional, but please dont let it consume you. I'm serious. You'll waste more money on industrial drives keeping useless things than helping anyone and your private collections literally do no good if they aren't shared with the world. But you aren't sharing them, you're hoarding. And unless that media actually fully goes lost, there won't be a "right time eventually". Save things you think are going to be at risk. I've done that before and it's paid off. But if you do every bit of media you're going to end up wasting it.
.....And for something a bit more relevant to your predicament in general (that being specifically hyperfocusing on the people), I don't really get like that as often but sometimes I still do, like when browsing a forum and seeing a specific individual over and over again that disappeared at some point, or someone's old DeviantArt account that is shown to have died at some point (that's happened more than once). My solution in general to the thoughts on mortality and the like is to appreciate the person as they were living, not the fact they are dead. Looking at their posts, at the person they were, pondering it a bit, but treating it as though they are not dead, just another individual (but yknow, maybe also adding a little "I Am Dead" token for future reference. If anyone gets that reference just know I am really just a big April Black fan and I've never played it). I mean, you can literally see who they were, and thats more. And remembering them for who they were is better than mourning them for something they weren't (ie, still alive). I also find it tends to give me a better lease on life. Whoel mortality thing really kicks in and then you think "Hmmm maybe I should do this thing I was supposed to do so if I also die instantaniously like this person, I won't have something unfinished lying around never to be realized."
I do also know though that I am saying all of this with years and years and years of seeing this sort of thing under my belt. After a certain point, it meshes together and you become desensitized to it which lets these sorts of reactions come on easier. Especially if you are younger or are newer to this, that sort of thing is definitely more of a shock than it would be to me who has seen many dead people's accounts on the internet before. An example of this: I wanted to show my friend this old dead MMO because I thought it was interesting but instead of being facinated, they became sad and scared, seeing all these different names of people who worked on the game and wondering if they were dead and all. We didn't play it for very long. I showed them a different one later, and that was all they could think about again. They don't normally explore these games, forums, etc; I do. To me what was a Saturday adventure was the equivilant of walking through a morgue. So, easier said than done, I know. Don't sweat it if none of these work for you. All of our brains are different and weird. But maybe like, if it's hitting you so hard, you should step back and take a nap. Sleeping always helps me solve my emotions when I am feeling particularly edgy/depressive on a certain day.
Those are just my thoughts though. Idk why writing all of this out the tone comes across as really like, arrogant and brash?? But uhh anyways. Idk if this will help or just make you feel more existencial with the extra talk of death and all.

[Misanthropic Monster™]

I get an odd sense of anxiety and dread that everything on the net won't exist forever, and that a LOT of stuff I used to love on old web is literally NOWHERE now, not even on the way back machine... it's just gone.... that is one of my huge HUGE regrets, not saving more content offline.

[paxcallow]

i'd played this tiny little flash game called opniyama a ways back that was so... different, so cute, and the music so joyful that it stuck with me, such that i even named a character after it: Opni. i kept coming back to it but at one point or another, it became deprecated and unplayable. it was lost to me and that's how i thought of it for years: lost. a tiny thing but a source of inspiration and happiness, and i couldn't touch it anymore except as a memory. ruffle and flashpoint brought a lot of those old games back, including opniyama, and i'm really grateful for that! but i totally understand the feeling that something lost on the internet can feel like a little gap in your heart. i'm 26 and i still feel that way about a stuffed cat toy i foolishly took on a log flume with me when i was a little kid.

i was a roblox kid, and as a few of my friends and i outgrew their forums, we made our own. i have a lot of happy memories from around that time, just goofing off and feeling like an equal in a community for the first time, having always felt like an outcast as a kid. we played forum games and shared Youtube Poops with each other and drew art for each other, and that forum is gone now. oh i've tried looking for it for a long time! to no avail.

i know there's nothing i can do because time and the internet marches on, so those memories are important to me, changed however they might be over time. and isn't that funny, that nothing can stay the same, not even your memory? sorry to wax poetic i didn't mean to do that on my third post.

EDIT: changed "YTPs" to "Youtube Poops" sorry didn't know acronyms were not allowed 

[prismatic]

oftentimes i still lurk my childhood forum and while it is by no means dead yet, it's a far cry from what it was even a few years ago. i don't post there anymore, but i do wonder what's going to become of it in the next couple of years. it's already showing its age quite a bit and it leaves me afraid of how inactive it's going to be in the next couple of years.

it's why i seek out other forums like these, rare as they are. i'm not naive; i know forums as a whole are no longer the bastion of discussion they used to be back in the 2000s and it is what it is. it's something i've long since accepted, but i also lurk sometimes in other smaller search engines for small forums like these since they remind me of the cozy feelings of what classic forums used to be.

to more directly answer the question - yeah, it makes me sad seeing dead websites and forums, because i see them all the time. i get hopeful when searching out the next forum to partake in, only to find out that it's long since abandoned or that it just rarely gets any posts.

[zj]

Me too. I used to go back to a forum i spent my early teens on every once in a while, but now that forum has been deleted - not archived, deleted.. all that remains are stills from the front page on the internet archive, that shows a few familiar usernames and thread titles of long-running forum games.. it's bittersweet to look at it through the lens of the internet archive, knowing all my old conversations are now unrecoverable. But nonetheless that part of my childhood shaped who I am today, and who all of us now are. Although many things are lost media,the memories remain. I sometimes head over to the youtube channel of a fellow past member, and seeing that they are also Still Here, grown since then, like me, is comforting. Like Nehnix said, the creativity and passion that fueled now dead forums and sites remains.