paul neave in why i create for the web:

But the most amazing thing about the web is simple yet devastatingly powerful, and the whole reason the web exists in the first place. It's the humble hyperlink.

paul is right. however links randomly disappear, move and change. carter maness writes:

Despite the pervasive assumption that everything online lasts forever, the internet is inherently unstable. We assume everything we publish online will be preserved. But websites are businesses. They get sold, forgotten and broken. Eventually, someone flips the switch and pulls it all down. Hosting charges are eliminated, and domain names slip quietly back into the pool. What’s left behind once the cache clears? For media companies deleting their sites, legacy doesn’t matter; the work carries no intrinsic value if there is no business remaining to capitalize on it. I asked if a backup still existed on a server somewhere. It apparently does; I was invited to purchase it for next to nothing. I could pay for the hosting, flip the switch on, and all my work would return. But I’d never really look at it. Then, eventually, I would stop paying the bills, too.

imagine books disappearing randomly from your bookshelf from time to time. however, this is a funny thought as it pretends books were always available to everyone trivially.

i for myself started archiving outgoing links in the wayback machine with a zsh snippet like this one. i know well that this is no real solution to this problem, but i hope it helps. for now.

function ia-archive() { curl -s -I https://web.archive.org/save/$* | grep Content-Location | awk '{print "Archived as: https://web.archive.org"$2}'; }