I've been thinking about permanence, hosting, and the Web. Namely, that the creation of the "link" is also the creation of "link rot"1: the fundamental structure of the Web (as opposed to the Internet) makes a promise that it can't keep.
The Internet2 is honest about how computers are networked. (This is the most technical paragraph in the post, feel free to skip if it doesn't mean anything to you). There is no predetermined path a message will take from node to node, for example. If a router goes offline, traffic will find new paths to its destination. Not only can the network's topology shift, a given domain name can't be trusted to resolve to the same host every time: that's why we have DNS! One of the constants of the Internet is change and adaptation.
The Web3 is... perhaps dishonest about networks? URLs encourage a mode of thinking where a given page is always available, and that it will be available indefinitely into the future. When this implicit promise is broken, "linkrot" results and "dead links" proliferate. In days well before my time the W3C insisted that "Cool URI's Don't Change"—an admonishment only necessary because URLs do change, all the time. There are books on my shelf with dead URLs printed in the jackets; I'm sure that the websites pointed to by faded ads around my city have long since gone offline.
Recently Google, Twitter4, and Imgur have all announced their intentions to delete inactive accounts and associated content. This is a well-trod path for any Web 2.0 company: every piece of user media you store costs money, but only some of it makes money. Flickr and PhotoBucket have walked similar paths before; I imagine future web services will walk it again. People are understandably mad about these changes, and I'm not happy that so much of our culture is mediated through for-profit institutions whose vast archives only exist to make a buck. I can't help but think, however, that these deletions represent a certain inevitability. Which seems likelier: that Imgur lasts indefinitely into the future, or that at some point it fails?
On a long enough timescale, I think we should expect most links to die. This isn't to say I think we should abandon the web5: I make mostly websites as my job! I'm writing this post in a website! This also isn't a post that ends with a neat "it's all the fault of capitalism"—anti-capitalist institutions don't exactly have a record of stable longevity either. I guess I'm just interested in ways our communications technology can embrace impermanence, change, and instability, rather than trying to pretend they don't exist. Maybe I should study library science or something.
Also if you want, give the Internet Archive some money. They do great work! And if you like this website, you can pay for its URLs to stay alive.6
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I'm not sure which writer this idea comes from, and I'm having some trouble finding it via search, but this post is largely inspired by the sentence "the invention of the car also creates the traffic jam and the car crash". If it helps any other sleuths, I first heard it on Friends at the Table
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Here I'm specifically referring to the underlying Internet technologies like IP, TCP, DNS, and BGP. The Internet as network-of-networks that computers use to talk to each other, not colloquial small-i "internet" (which is broadly synonymous with "the web", at least for laypeople)
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Specifically I'm more focused on the URL and Web culture than I am HTTP or HTML. Web sites, hyperlinks, y'know
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Honestly not sure if Twitter has enough engineering ability left to actually delete inactive accounts, but I'm more confident in Google and Imgur following through
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While there are interesting alternatives I don't know too much about, like IPFS (which unfortunately seems to have strong ties to cryptocurrency), most historical alternatives were either vaporware (Xanadu) or were incompatible with a rich-media-drenched world (Gopher)
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This draft predates the recent Cohost financial update (the original call to action was just the Internet Archive link actually) but it now feels a little more topical