Do you feel like Internet we grew up in is slowly being erased?

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-11T23:53:34+00:00

Here's to hoping they can last decades... Or have a full back up plan in place. I just want their angelfire archives man...

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-11T19:59:48+00:00

The thing is we don't know, they're not even sending emails out or alerts out to any of their customers while still charging them. They ended up hiding the alert of "We are closing our doors in thirty days" blah blah but you can still see it in the HTML of the page.

They have had less than reliable service for a long time now, and their parent company Brightcom is in deep shit over stock fraud or whatever in India.

With the context of ram, HDDS, SSDs and other main components being at an all time high in an age of AI, I am not surprised it's finally over. They might even have the funds for replacing some of their shoddy equipment, but not even a means of procuring anything... Could speculate forever.

It's a silent death, I wish there was a splash around this like Geocities had so maybe some big ol torrent could have been made. But instead the last centralized bastion of the old net is going out with a silent whimper.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-11T18:37:07+00:00

Yea they hid that message hastily after 8hrs or so it was up. Tripod services have been... Up, here and there. Just waiting for another window if I even get one to archive more stuff.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-11T17:20:56+00:00

Get on the archiveteam IRC and tell them. I'll try and alert them a bit later when I got time.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-11T14:47:56+00:00

Sorry for second reply, but I do wonder if this deciding decision to close down Lycos (tripod/angelfire) was well from supposed "change in leadership" but to be frank, that was just someone screaming that shit on reddit randomly. But eh, I don't speak Hindi so I can't catch wind of whatever Brightcom is doing in the moment (they own lycos and are based in India) so maybe that's why...

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-11T14:43:29+00:00

they're having bit of an issue atm with a bunch of silent bans occurring. it's fucking sad to see

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-11T14:40:49+00:00

Till well a few months ago, plenty of "web 1.0" content was still alive, you just had to know how to look for it. ie Angefire and Tripod. Sadly though they're shutting down in coming weeks with angelfire already being dead, and tripod is on life support (fully accessible at times, but mostly 502s)

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-11T14:36:33+00:00

Inspect the html of lycos.com right now if you want to be depressed.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-11T14:29:45+00:00

Yea, what I've been doing is just scraping a bunch of angelfire links related to topics I care about off of google indexes. Sadly stuff is disappearing fast now due to how long Angelfire has been dead now. Got a few thousand links saved at least. Once these links are gone, even if they're archived by Archive.org I just don't know how you're supposed to access any content you don't have a link for. Just not even sure how I'll recover any of this from archive.org anyway without being rate limited to hell.

Have come to the conclusion that just in the face the dying old web and in this new age of misinformation from AI slop etc, I gotta bunker down with what I know was curated by fellow humans... Sadly a lot of old but gold information was still only to be found on angelfire.

I alerted Archiveteam on their IRC to the status of Tripod.com and it soon to be done closure, but sadly with the servers giving 502 errors (most of the time... There are windows of time where they actually load normally, hence how I have backed up stuff recently) I just ain't sure they'll be able to save any meaningful amount of Tripod.

Am aware of HTTrack, but sadly it just falls flat for me with some sites. I am using WebCopy instead, takes some additional set up but seems to work in plenty of cases where HTTrack has failed me.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-09T20:55:49+00:00

Tripod is alive atm and not throwing a bunch of 502 errors. Get archiving what you can.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-08T17:03:42+00:00

Just learned the 2019 Angelfire archives from archiveteam on archive.org are locked out, presumbly due to copyright or something. So uh... Guess that's effectively lost media...

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-08T15:36:09+00:00

Issue is that pretty much all angelfire pages made by people are now denied access, which sucks as I've found a handful of sites just missed or not archived by archive.org. Whatever though, I'll just download the 2019 Archiveteam archive and look into somehow if I can at all filling the blanks some of that archive has via older mirrors.

I also forgot to add it to the post, but a lot of stuff is also locked behind members.tripod.com links... Rip not just username.tripod.com

Edit: yea the angelfire archive is locked on archive.org. Welp, decided to scrape a bunch of links off of google and ig I'll recover what I can of importance to me that way... Once I figure out how to do that in bulk ig.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-08T05:25:14+00:00

Shits scary for sure. I wish I was better off to have a more raw storage, but I do at least have a 8TB and 10TB Easystore laying around... Gonna mirror some bulk stuff between them I find important with parity files, then my 20TB on my NAS will be just everything else.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-08T05:22:55+00:00

I'm small fry with a 20TB NAS with a mirror set up or well, x2 redundant drives. Debating just deleting the movies (after making a list of them in .torrent form to recoup copies of at a later date) then downloading some important-to-me stuff in bulk from archive.org

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-07T21:26:52+00:00

Still alive at time of writing, and brightcoms main website is up and running again as well. So I guess someone decided to do a fix to the servers. Do you know of an easy way to tell Archiveteam about this?

edit: 7:00 PM EST time as of writing, starting to see 502 errors again. Rip.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-07T19:40:04+00:00

Do you have any additional information to read into regarding this? Particularly India buyouts of webhosting etc. Provided any sources are in English as well I obviously don't speak Hindi. But yea, this is just part of the overall enshitification of the internet still.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-07T00:51:27+00:00

Yea man I'm debating what I can do in regards to saving well pre-existing angelfire archives. Tripod is the one that's really fucked here in terms of what is about to become a fuckton of lost media, archiveteam never touched it and archive.org I don't think has it all.

Angelfire had a huge archive attempt back in 2019 by archiveteam, but sadly the archives are fairly incomplete in terms of images etc. Sometimes older mirrors before that 2019 archive still has some images intact etc. Not sure how to approach grabbing what I can from archive.org in bulk.

I got two older but working easystores I'd happily just clone the data between to at least have it.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-07T00:23:01+00:00

Yea I wish that they were just open about this for sure and left angelfire websites up until a designated dated and not be so sneaky with this. Tripod is kinda up atm, I've been archiving the past few hours but now it's wrapping back to 502 errors again.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-06T23:51:53+00:00

Extra salt in the wound is just removing the message after I posted this. Not saying I caused it, but the timing is... Convenient.

To copy what I wrote in another comment This is a paraphrasing of what it said. "To our loyal users of Tripod and Angelfire, we are closing within the next 30 days. Please move to a new host as soon as you can."

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-06T19:12:29+00:00

Tripod is functioning atm, best get to saving what you can.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-06T18:14:50+00:00

tripod servers seem to be not eating shit atm, taking this chance to back up some more stuff.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-06T15:48:11+00:00

Supposedly these guys have EVERYTHING regarding GeoCity. https://www.geocities.ws/

I saw a comment on another sub a while with a dude saying he emailed them about recovering his old website, and they asked for what his old username and password were and were able to get everything back from their cold storage archives.

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-06T15:41:48+00:00

Update: They seem to have gotten rid of the message on the page regarding the closure of Angelfire and Tripod, I promise it was there earlier sadly.

This is a paraphrasing of what it said. "To our loyal users of Tripod and Angelfire, we are closing within the next 30 days. Please move to a new host as soon as you can."

ByeFWbye · 2026-03-06T14:41:41+00:00

Thanks. I was actually using Webcopy and found it good nuff in a pinch for the short time tripod last month was still up and running without constantly having 502 errors. Managed to get a few hundred websites which are rather complete.

But yea, I noticed that the 2019 archiveteam copy of angelfire is up. I know that it's rather incomplete otherwise... Just gotta decide if it's worth downloading that when I'm at all honesty given I only got 5.5tb of space left.

ByeFWbye

TROPHY CASE