Hello, World!
Hello. I made this website to protect the things I like from disappearing.
It was on the spur of the moment, after I decided to look through all the liked YouTube videos I'd accumulated since the early 2010s, and found a significant chunk made private or deleted by their uploaders. I then wondered about all the sites sitting neglected in my bookmarks bar and clicked on some I probably added years ago, only to find 404 pages or worse, the site no longer existing altogether.
The Internet is only forever if someone remembers to back it up. There are so many webpages, forums, and posts that have vanished off the face of the web, the Wayback Machine and Google Cache included.Nobody at the time saw them as worthy of preservation, and now some ultimately-not-important-but-fun pieces of my childhood exist only in my memories, and memories don't stay vivid forever.
Even when people do archive something, once said piece of media has been taken down and can only be viewed through the Wayback Machine, it's next to impossible for someone to stumble upon it again without first having preexisting knowledge of it, or being directed there by someone else. So my plan is to use this site as a kind of 'media diary', for me to note down and write my thoughts on whatever site/article/video I've come across for the day, not just for me to reminisce, but also share it with whoever happens to come across this obscure corner of the web so that its memory may be preserved.Even if I receive no visitors at all, it'll be nice for me to look back in a couple years and see what my younger self was up to.
Another reason why I'm doing this is, I suspect, the same as many other people who want to be a part of the Indie Web. I want to get away from the 24/7 outrage machine that is current social media. I greatly dislike what seems to me a culture of dogmatic distrust and mockery of whoever does not align with your tribe, and the policing of creative works for their supposed moral failings (AKA the author doesn't treat their story like an Aesop's Fable). There is a lot of anger and negativity out there, and I think I'm better off spending my time online not surrounded by pessimism and gloom.
I also want to slow down and take the time to process the content I consume, instead of scrolling down an endless feed and continuously flitting from one piece of content to the other. I've spent evenings binging YouTube channels or blogs with my brain turned off, where at the end of it I felt I didn't really absorb anything before reaching for my next dopamine hit. Hopefully this changes that.
Now that I've written down all of this, I'd look silly if I don't keep to my word and end up neglecting this site for almost a year again. I've made it my 2025 resolution to try and update this project of mine at least monthly. With any luck this may be something I'll continue to run even if Neocities ever goes down.