What Happens When Digital Cities Are Abandoned?

“The great paradox about these digital communities is that they’re easily kept around forever, and they are even more easily deleted utterly,” said Jason Scott, an Internet advocate and archivist who launched a digital preservation team that year….

I recently tried to revisit my own first homepage, a wonder of center-aligned blinking text, purple tiled backgrounds, clever “Under Construction” gifs and pixel-art icons I had traded with other GeoCities page owners. But all that remains is a single mention of the username on someone else’s page, a record of my having visited there once. Because of the nature of the sites, none of the archives of GeoCities is 100 percent complete, and it’s difficult to know for sure how much actually still exists; much of the data is simply being stored for a later date, when technology has reached the ability to collate and curate it all. — Laura E. Hall, The Atlantic.