Vanishingly few people on Earth are as close to web archival as I am. How many people are lucky enough to call it their full-time job? And I have a small bit of depressing news: Yes, the web is getting worse.
Websites that used to be open are now requiring registration to just view content and forcing users onto proprietary apps. APIs that once encouraged creative usage of data are tougher to access and offer less access. Restrictions on crawling via robots.txt and heavier-handed tactics such as Cloudflare are making it harder to preserve crucial content. Ads are getting more intrusive and frequent.
Everything is being turned into a fine paste of hallucinated LLM slurry. The web is failing at the thing it used to be best at: Directing you to the information you seek as provided by a human who knows about the topic and has taken care to write about it accurately.
It's made it a huge challenge to archive the web, but it's also, obviously, made it a lot harder to find true community in the way that we used to. It's really tough for a distinctly human website like Cohost to thrive in a content slop world. So much money has flowed into the worst possible version of Tech, and building sustainable community-driven projects is really challenging in that environment.
I mourn the loss of Cohost and the web of the past. I don't think we're ever going to go back to what things were like before the money and reactionary rich guys ruined everything, but I'm hoping that we can continue to hold on to each other, build nice things for ourselves, and ensure they're preserved for the future.