But loss of internet history has happened again and again and will continue to do so for time immemorial. We lost Webshots. We lost Geocities. Timecube is gone. All of my old Yahoo accounts, groups, friends and associated content have either been lost to data breaches or outright reassigned. Photobucket is a shell of what it once was, what with their blocking hotlinks and purging old data. Anything you created in Second Life will only last as long as the parent company decides it's worth supporting their subpar VRML engine for the benefit of its dwindling community of sexual deviants. As the internet becomes more and more centralized on a handful of platforms that happily ingest our data but refuse to efficiently excrete it for archival, bringing it with them to the grave, and that will themselves one day be replaced with something more hip, all your precious memories, photos and top-tier memes will be lost to time like tears in rain.

It's nobody's fault. It's the natural order of things. Old technologies and platforms die, and new ones take their place. Some data loss happens in the transition. The internet circa 2000 might have sentimental value to you and I, but it's counterproductive to insist that all web browsers need to be able to support playback of Peanut Butter Jelly Time SWFs, RealPlayer-encoded Nine Inch Nails videos, Metallica's homepage from 1997, or binaries of P.F. Chang's menus in their original form in perpetuity. Sometimes it's best to let go of sentiment for the sake of progress.