Wanting to share some thoughts on this so now I'm writing a lil' blog post to get them out there ahh! But as the title says today I learnt my site has been snapshotted on archive.org. This was brought to my attention as I saw a fellow neocities user made a short post mentioning their site had been archived. I mean, I'd known about the wayback machine for years but I expected my site to be so inconsequential it surely wouldn't get archived right? Well turns out they have multiple snapshots of my site including one that dates back as far as august 2022 (I started this site in june of that year), which, to a degree, I have to commend their dedication to preserving such small parts of the internet, however I can't help but feel a bit put off by the situation. And I don't think I'm alone in feeling that way.
This site is a personal site, and over the years I have changed as a person, and as an extension so has my site. I find it valuable to look back on how far I've come. To the best of my abilities I have made my own site archives (previews of which are available on my site and I am willing to share more details with people upon request). But to have someone else make those archives for me, without my permission and then share them publicly feels a bit, wrong? I know that whatever you post to the internet is here forever, and if you don't want that you shouldn't post here, but I find that to be more of a precautionary tale, something you are told to protect you from people acting maliciously. Excluding those cases we *could* all agree that things don't have to be preserved on the internet forever and live by that rule instead. My point here being: as a personal website and expression of myself I want my old web pages to have the freedom to fade into obscurity and to be forgotten about. The only person who should have the power to revive them and share them with other people should be me, not because I wanna gatekeep information or something, but just because I'm the only one who can explain how and why any part of my website came to be. This is all waaaay more deep than I intended it to be and perhaps poorly articulated but there you go.
Long story short I am (at this point in time) planning to request the snapshots be removed and no further snapshots are taken, though I'm not sure how soon I plan to do it. Ideally I'd like to be able to send one email and then never have to worry about it again, but I have been planning on changing my url (scftst4rs was always intended to be a placeholder but here we are several years later I guess...) and don't want to have to send another request for the new url to be removed also. I do wonder if they won't be able to verify the validity of my request if I no longer own the url though? Many questions but again, aiming for only one email so I guess they all have to be answered when I get around to it.
I do really respect the archive's work and honestly, in like however many years when I'm dead, I think I'd actually appreciate my stuff being preserved this way, the same way I appreciate being able to look back on other peoples forgotten places and projects. But while I'm still kicking and occupying my little website it does feel like it crosses some boundaries. So while ideally I wish the archive could privately keep snapshots of my site and then when I die they made it public, that is not how this works.
I would really like to hear other people's views on this, especially if you also own a personal website! And I know I've said this many times over the last several years but if anyone has any advice or inspo for me to pick a new username please send it my way TwT; As always thank you for reading and I hope you're doing well! :)