Everything I Built on the Internet Is Gone

I built my first website in 1994. It doesn't load anymore.

The blog I kept in 1999 is gone too. So is the server it lived on, and the company that owned the server, and the format the files were written in. I've been making things on the internet for thirty years, and almost none of it survives. Not because anyone deleted it. Because the ground under it kept dissolving.

Myspace lost twelve years of people's music in one botched migration. GeoCities went dark and took millions of pages with it. Photos, friendships, band pages, the comments from people they loved. Nobody decided to destroy any of it. A platform just does what platforms do. It has a lifespan, and your things are along for the ride.

I grew up between two countries. My family moved between Peru and Texas, and every move sorted our belongings into two piles: what could come, and what couldn't. You learn early that what a family keeps is not an accident. Somebody chose it. Somebody carried it. A shoebox survives that way. An account on someone else's platform doesn't.

The genealogy industry knows all this. Its answer is a subscription. Put your grandmother in our database and pay us monthly to visit her. Stop paying and the records you attached go dark. The tree stays, technically. The reasons it mattered don't.

That arrangement made me angry in a way I couldn't put down.

So I built the thing I wanted: a quiet place where a family's tree, photos, recipes, and stories live together, where living relatives stay private without configuring anything, and where the door out is never locked. Every export works on the free plan. If you leave, you leave whole. I named it Family Roots Center, and I built the demo so you can walk through a full six-generation family without giving me an email address.

I don't know if it becomes a business. I know that the internet I've spent my career on is a terrible place to keep the dead, and that the people we come from deserve better than a rented room.

The next move is always coming. I'm choosing what gets carried.