GeoCities was one of the largest platforms on the early web.
Millions of users created personal websites documenting their lives, interests, communities, and ideas. These pages contained personal histories, cultural artifacts, and early forms of online identity.
In 2009, Yahoo shut down GeoCities.
When the platform was closed, millions of websites disappeared.
The signals had existed. The infrastructure that preserved them did not.
Entire communities lost their published histories. References in blogs, forums, and directories began pointing to pages that no longer existed.
Only fragments survived through independent archiving efforts.
This event demonstrated that persistence depends on infrastructure, not on the existence of the information itself.
Without persistent infrastructure, digital history can disappear at platform scale.
Source Wikipedia — GeoCities