lost sites

From IndieWeb

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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.

Why document

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We document lost sites that are relevant or mentioned in the IndieWeb, or technologies that the IndieWeb is based on, or related projects & proposals, so if people go looking for them, there is some chance they’ll find this page and learn what happened to such sites.

We also document lost sites as a substitute for old links on the wiki. Instead of linking to the lost site, we link to its domain as a page on this wiki e.g. indieweb.xyz instead of https://indieweb.xyz.

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

How to document

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How to document lost sites:

  • Keep in mind, be kind. Most lost sites were a personal effort or possibly a hobby or other labor of love that the creator/maintainer either ran out of time to maintain (see: life happens), or otherwise forgot or lost interest. When you document a lost site, be kind as to possible reasons etc.
  • What to document any site/domain that has/had links on the IndieWeb wiki (or mentioned in chat) is worth documenting because
  • Create a domain page or redirect when you find a lost site, create a page (or redirect to an existing page about that person, project, or org) for its domain here on the wiki so there's a place to relink other links to that domain on the wiki.
  • Add it to a list below
    • IndieWeb Examples: for former IndieWeb sites, e.g. mentioned in an IndieWeb Examples section on another page on the wiki
    • Notable Independent Sites: other independent sites (personal sites) that were never explicit IndieWeb Examples per se.
    • Other Examples: other domains that the IndieWeb wiki linked to at some point or another
  • Consider adding to site-deaths or zombies
    • site-deaths: If the lost site also lost a lot of profiles and content from other people, add it to site-deaths.
    • zombies: If the lost site has been squatted or otherwise taken over by a dangerous site (scamming, phishing, cryptocurrency mining or other kind of deception), please add it to the zombie page.

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 equivalent IndieWeb.org User:domain page. Sorted alphabetically.

Notable Independent Sites

More independent or indie websites. Sorted alphabetically.

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:

Notable subdomains

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).

If this section gets too big, we can start with moving silo subdomains (e.g. Tumblr) to a separate page of lost profiles.

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
  • peoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com — a humorous Tumblr documenting examples of people scanning QR codes in the wild (last Internet Archive version before it was taken over by mortgage spam)
  • 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

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