I kept a link to a webring from 2003 that connected fan sites for a dead MMORPG. Clicked it this morning and it just times out now. For years that thing was my little time capsule, way more reliable than the wayback machine because it had all the broken quirks intact. What finally got me to admit it's gone is I went looking for a specific guide on that ring about crafting armor, and not even a cached version exists. I'm kinda sad, but also it made me realize I was holding onto a site that nobody else cared about. Does anyone else keep tabs on a dead corner of the net just because it used to be your hangout spot?
I had a Geocities page for a dead wrestling forum that I probably checked once a month for like eight years straight. The ring hub was called The Steel Cage Consortium and it linked out to maybe 40 member sites, and last time I clicked through about half of them 404'd while the rest went to those weird domain parking pages with fake search results. There was this one guy's site, RikishiFan98 or something, that had a whole section of hand drawn cage match predictions and I kept going back just to read those dumb write ups. It finally went dark around 2019 and I remember feeling weirdly gutted about it, like a place I used to hang out got torn down. You're not alone in this, some of us just never learned to let go of the old corners of the net.