Found my old Geocities page from 2002 and the guestbook is a mess of broken links.

I was looking through some old bookmarks and clicked on the link to my 'Under Construction' Geocities site about my cat. Every single guestbook entry from my high school friends now points to a 404 error or a parked domain page. It made me realize how fragile those old webrings and personal sites really were. Do you think we should try to rebuild those connections or just accept that part of the early internet is gone for good?

3 comments

3 Comments

lilyf742mo ago

My Geocities page was for my Beanie Baby collection and honestly, I'm glad it's gone. Those broken links feel like a clean break from a pretty awkward time. Why would we want to rebuild pages full of midi files and under construction gifs? The early web was a mess we had to live through, not a museum we need to fix.

max8082mo ago

But that mess is the whole point, right? It shows how regular people first tried to figure out the internet. Those weird pages with visitor counters and tiled backgrounds are a real record of how we all learned. Saving some of it isn't about the beanie babies, it's about keeping proof that the web wasn't always just big companies and clean apps.

diana871mo ago

Those broken links are the real history, not the polished stuff. They show the actual mess of people trying to connect. Trying to clean it up would miss the point completely.