Back in the late 90s, I made a website, which was inspired by another website I had seen - which I had found by chance on whichever search engine I was using at the time (there were so many back then). I was not the only one. A good 30 or 40 of us ended up with a bunch of separate but connected websites that traded stories and art, resulting in a whole community revolving around a shared interest.

It all faded away in the mid/late 00s as people got jobs and families, and ISPs stopped offering webhosting and Geocities was shut down… But it was still something that stayed with me as a lot of fond memories (plus some not-so-fond ones, because let’s face it, teenagers can be dramatic). In the midst of the pandemic, I got an email one day from someone from that community who was wondering if anyone was interested in starting it back up again, and so was reaching out to see if any of the old email addresses were still active. Well, mine was, and it turned out quite a few of the others were too - and other people were reachable under the same usernames on other platforms.

Long story short, we’ve got a group of almost 30 people who resurrected an old 90s and 00s community. Most participated in the original version, others were friends who joined the new version because it looked like fun. We’ve all got websites in various stages of construction (yep, after 3 years, some of these websites are still only barely functional!), mostly using our own webhosting or borrowing a subdomain on someone else’s - and most using nothing more than HTML and CSS. Some things are different: back in the old days, I never hesitated to put my email address on the site to invite contributions from others in the community. I wouldn’t do that now. We use Discord and Google Forms instead.

Where I’m going with this is that keeping a little bit of the internet alive has taken a deliberate effort. It was definitely all of us who vanished, and we had to make the effort to get back together, to rebuild websites, to share old files to help reconstruct information that’s lost to the mists of time (a shared records database runs to 22,000 entries). I very much doubt any of it is discoverable without very specific search terms. But I think that’s okay.