Stumbled on an old Geocities fan page for a defunct band last night

I was looking up some lyrics from a band I liked in high school and clicked a Wayback Machine link. It took me to a Geocities page with a starry background and animated GIFs of the band's logo spinning around. The owner had a guestbook with entries from 1998 where people just said stuff like "great site!" and shared their favorite songs. It hit me how pure and simple fan culture was back then, no algorithms or likes just people making pages for the love of it. Has anyone else found a time capsule page that brought back that feeling?

2 comments

2 Comments

kevin_sullivan1d ago

Right click that guestbook address and save a copy of the whole page to your desktop. Wayback Machine links break eventually but a local HTML file won't.

lily57420h ago

Wait, is that actually how the Wayback Machine works though? I always thought once it archives something it stays there unless the whole service goes down, not that links break over time. Cause I've gone back to old GeoCities pages years apart and they were still working. But maybe its different for sites that got moved around or partially restored? Anyway. That feeling you described is exactly what I got when I found a fan page for a local band called The Starlights that only existed for like two years in the late 90s. The page had these terrible scanned photos of them playing at a community center and the owner wrote reviews of each show like "they played a new song tonight but I forgot the name, it was good though." No pressure to be clever or get likes, just a kid sharing what they loved. Its wild how we traded all that for engagement metrics and clout chasing. Sometimes I wonder if we lost something real when we stopped making pages for the pure fun of it.