> After years of bureaucratic delays, the domain was finally shut down in 2010. Over 4,000 websites, some of the earliest examples of internet culture from the region, suddenly became inaccessible via their original domain. For many, the deletion of .yu represented the final loss of the former country, the erasure of its digital identity.
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> With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records. Gone are firsthand accounts of the NATO bombing and the Kosovo War; the mailing lists that scientists used to update their colleagues on the progress of the conflict; nostalgic forums and playful virtual nation experiments.
> With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records. Gone are firsthand accounts of the NATO bombing and the Kosovo War; the mailing lists that scientists used to update their colleagues on the progress of the conflict; nostalgic forums and playful virtual nation experiments
Ah, that explains it.
When I try to explain what actually happened during that war to younger generations, I find it hard to impossible to find backing documentation to prove my point. As paranoid as I am, I usually attribute this to "history rewriting", and although that is probably part of it, i didn't realise a lot of information was actually lost.
It's not just that, but in 1997-98 for me living in Yugoslavia, my main online channels were still primarily usenet groups and irc servers and even some BBS-es still operating - it was for us as big deal as social networks are now. Just a few years later we all were on forums and icq/msn, and protocols like usenet and gopher became funny words new kids going online never heard of. It was a huge shift that happened world-wide, wasn't anything specific to YU. And yes, incredible amounts of historical data got lost in that transition.
I got into a habit of screenshotting and printing (more like save to pdf) anything that I find important.
Too many times I found that an event that was in the news few years ago and suddenly is relevant today has been scrubbed.
(For instance a certain doctor hosting a conference sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, then few years later same doctor, now promoted, blocks prescriptions of certain drug that would otherwise cause said pharmaceutical to lose money, at the expense of patients - no longer can find evidence of the event online).
Frankly, I'm not even sure details matter that much, really. What actually happened was smaller acts of aggression that escalated step by step. It was totally uncontrollable. There was a huge amount of hatred on all sides. And nobody had any idea how to stop it. For everybody outside it was completely senseless killing, there was no real reason for it. The UN mission was a total failure.
Then NATO came with the idea of bombing but they were afraid to fly too low so apart from bombing the military they also bombed civilians. Many people in Serbia remember this and Putin loves to remind everybody of that. When you dig into it you only discover ugly things.
The UN mission was also spineless and a proximate cause of a lot of trouble. It can be seen in the few instances where UN troops stood their ground, it had good results.
There was so many technical problems with just the name of the country changing from Yugoslavia, over Serbia and Montenegro, to being just Serbia. It took ages for big companies to follow up on this, and to this day some Google services still have a bug where some old accounts have Serbia and Montenegro listed as a country, they were never transitioned to Serbia - and as you can imagine that can seriously mess up payments and access to apps for account owners. Another TLD floating around to confuse people would be just PITA.
> With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records
Don't worry, these sites probably moved to some other location - after all a website only exists while the owner has a stake in it (and is paying for that dns record + hosting/traffic)
> It's what happens when a place that was supposed to be free and decentralized has become the exact opposite
This is where you lost me. Wayback machine is a centralized repository.
A decentralized system would not have prevented data loss any better without burdening peers with shit they rightfully don't want to host. Nobody wants the cost of hosting anything but their own, and only their own, content.
The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.
The centralization of the web through a for profit oligopoly is not the same as having a central respiratory of data by a non-profit.
One of those destroyed net neutrality and most online free speech, the other is a charity trying to be the last memorial of it.
> The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.
What about the incentive of keeping a somewhat thrustworthy and complete digital historical record? Is that worth nothing outside of its sheer monetization potential?
Try doing that outside of the FAANG dominance and you have some work cut out for you because they've spent the last decades either buying up any prospective "competition" or straight up marginalizing it into irrelevance.
Which is, to state it again, the antithesis to what the web was supposed to be, it started as a scientific venture [0], it inspired a whole new way of looking at the world and our minds in it [1].
Profit incentives came only later, they were not inherint to this space, they invaded it and took it over.
Yes, I'm romanitizing a lot of idealism here, but I think it's important to remember that era and mindset of the early web.
It's important to remind people that the current web was neither the goal nor has it still much to do with the web of the old, a place of counter-culture, not of corporate mainstream pushing overwhelming government messages while keeping more tabs on you than even the Stasi could ever dream about.
If not satire: especially in the early internet, sites were university hosted. It was not uncommon for a site to live at, for instance, http://galadriel.mathdept.universityname.tld
The web server could either be a forgotten SUN pizzabox in a closet somewhere, or the new-fangled http 1.1 thing where you could have several domains on the same server! Crazy, I know!
It was not uncommon for these early relics to just chug along unatteneded for years after anyone even know what they were for, and no one cared much either.
If a DNS record disappeared, the server may still have been running for years, but effectively nobody would have known how to access it.
As a sysadmin at a university in a former life, it's also very hard to kill those things when you know where they live
Often it's easier to just migrate that directory to the new web server if there's nothing insecure in there, lest you generate a call from some faculty member to the Chair's office that ends up landing in your inbox
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> With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records. Gone are firsthand accounts of the NATO bombing and the Kosovo War; the mailing lists that scientists used to update their colleagues on the progress of the conflict; nostalgic forums and playful virtual nation experiments.