7 - The Internet is Rotting

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity's knowledge together is coming undone.

We've all run into broken links before, and maybe scoured the internet archives for the lost bad takes of the past. Annoyed at "link rot." Confused by content drift. I have blog posts, published over the years, that are lost to the internet.

I like Amber's approach: whenever linking to a site, archiving it in order to maintain the longterm health (link "freshness" instead of rot?) of a page. In side projects, where I'm referrencing content, I have dumped the content into a private Dendron vault for safe keeping. This has helped me lookup something I've taken note of in the past. I haven't made an Internet Archive account, though, and now I'm really wondering why I haven't.

If I was an academic, I would be backing up absolutely everything I could: citations, notes, videos, screenshots, etc.

Side note: Dendron doesn't want to break links just because a page is moved, which makes site maintenance of our wiki much easier. We maintain the same URL, generated by the unique id of a note at creation time, and automatically update all internal links whenever hierarchy refactoring or note renames happen.

Links (fresh for the moment) of interest:


Backlinks