lost sites

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lost sites are former sites (including IndieWeb sites) on domains that the owner abandoned or lost control over (AKA domain deaths), are unresponsive or often taken over by other parties, sometimes turned into zombies; links to such domains should be replaced with Internet Archive versions.

Note: a site that removes large (most or all) of its content has experienced a site-death and the domain owner may still be the same, they may use it for some other purpose. It's not a "lost site" in that regard since the owner still maintains control over it, and may restore some or most of the content eventually.

IndieWeb Examples

When adding a site here, either link it to its last valid/recognizable Internet Archive version (beware of archived zombie versions), or to the equivalen IndieWeb.org User:domain page.

• kylewm.com, Kyle Mahan's personal site, lost ~2019
• neverusethisfont(.)com - Aaron Parecki's blog from 2008-2010, after which the content was moved and redirected to aaronparecki.com
• woodwind.xyz domain abandoned since 2018
• davidpea(.)ch, David Peach’s personal site since 2019 at least

Notable Independent Sites

• shirky.com, Clay Shirky‘s blog, domain lost as of least 2022, possibly sometime in 2019 unfortunately due to being unable to keep up with the admintax of updating WordPress for vulnerabilities & exploits. Notable essays:
  • https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky.com/writings/information_price.html
  • 2003-07-01 A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
  • 2003-11-07 The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview
  • 2005 Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (his own favorite essay)

Other Examples

Examples of domains linked from IndieWeb sites or other web standards / open web / web development or events related sites. If you find a dead domain from a link you previously blogged (or saw on this wiki), feel free to add it here carefully marked up like:

<nowiki>dead-domain.example.com</nowiki>

to avoid making a live link, and to help warn other IndieWeb folks and provide at least a minimal blocklist for anyone crawling IndieWeb sites.

Alphabetical:

• activitydialog.org — building block of ActivityWeb
• activitypush.org — building block of ActivityWeb
• activityweb.org — 2012 proposal for a simpler replacement for OStatus
• arewemobileyet.com, status site of WebAPIs for various mobile device hardware features — now shows a js;dr domain for sale message
• codingforums.com — died ~2016, was for sale as of 2021, now an Indonesian WordPress spam gambling site
• etherpad-mozilla.org — taken over by an anti-porn site sometime after May 2018.
• federatedsocialweb.net — links to federatedsocialweb.net/... can be autolinked to https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/...
• instagrid.me — used to be a site for displaying tagged photos from Instagram, e.g. http://instagrid.me/tag/indiewebcamp however since squatted and turned into gambling spam
  • Instead use: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/indiewebcamp/
• interoperabilitybridges.com started redirecting to a Bing search, and down as of 2023
• itclixsocial.com — was a replacement for instagrid, in particular to "Download Video". now redirects to a js;dr Chinese site
• opensourcebridge.org — OSBridge conference site
• openwebcamp.org — open web conference at Stanford 2010—2013, currently (2023) squatted by an Indonesian gambling site
• ostatus.org — currently (2022) squatted by an Indonesian gambling site, squatted (by them or another party) since 2018-09 or earlier, lost in 2012.
• pdf-18.com (and www.pdf-18.com) — Personal Democracy Forum 2018 Conference site — as of 2023 redirects to a gambling site.
• personaldemocracy.com — site for Personal Democracy Forum 2014 (and possibly other years) — unresponsive as of 2023.
• pronoun.is — a simple pronoun usage site that made use of Herokus free tier, which was discontinued in 2022 (last working Internet Archive version)
  • Github issue to get it back online: https://github.com/witch-house/pronoun.is/issues/147
• stagram.com and web.stagram.com — since squatted and redirects to CBD spam
• statigr.am — used to be a site for displaying tagged photos from Instagram (e.g. http://statigr.am/tag/indiewebcamp), got bought or turned into a site for "buying followers"
  • Instead use: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/indiewebcamp/
• status.net — was a flagship implementation of OStatus, now (2023, probably earlier) an SEO spam WordPress site.
• userscripts.org, directory of browser aka Greasemonkey user scripts

Notable subdomains — subdomains are generally not tracked / included on this page, except on notable sites whose main domain appears to still be up (and consistent with its past)

Sorted alphabetically by main domain:

• demos.hacks.mozilla.org — taken down in 2012 (latest Internet Archive version)
• wiki.openwebfoundation.org — a MediaWiki that succumbed to spam, taken down end of 2013
• usa10.webdirections.org — a 2010 web design & development conference site that was hacked with pharma spam

See zombie examples for particularly dangerous lost sites.

See Also

• site-deaths
• zombie
• Use-case: don't bother indexing/crawling links to these domains