GeoCities Archived, To Be Released via Torrent

It's a piece of Internet history compressed and distributed via BitTtorrent.

Wednesday Archive Team said that it is archiving GeoCities in its entirety and will release the backed-up network in one file via BitTorrent.

The news arrives just a year after Yahoo! shut down the free web hosting service. GeoCities launched back in 1995 and quickly became the third most popular website by 1999, offering free web hosting that organized webpages into six "neighborhoods." Yahoo! bought GeoCities for $3.57 billion in stock back in January 1999 and began to throttle web traffic by 2001. Yahoo! eventually shut down the service on October 26, 2009.

But as Archive Team stated, history wasn't just disappearing with the closure of GeoCities, but rather history was being actively and quickly destroyed on purpose. "It’s not like Yahoo! had some sort of terrible server failure or something," the team stated. "They in fact had made the active decision to turn off the site called GeoCities, an at-that-point 15 year old hosting site that contained terabytes of user-generated content."

The group went on to present an excellent case for archiving the "classic" web hosting service. In essence, GeoCities captured the voice of virtual pioneers embarking on a journey through the new virtual Wild West. It was a time when the general consumer discovered what an ISP was, what the built-in modem was for, and where a "browser" could take them. GeoCities provided a platform for those users to voice their thoughts, their opinions, and share their journey with others across the new World Wide Web.

Realizing this, the group quickly scrambled to salvage what they could before Yahoo! brought the virtual neighborhood to a close last year.

"What we were facing, you see, was the wholesale destruction of the still-rare combination of words digital heritage, the erasing and silencing of hundreds of thousands of voices, voices that representing the dawn of what one might call 'regular people' joining the World Wide Web," the group said. "A unique moment in human history, preserved for many years and spontaneously combusting due to a few marks in a ledger, the decision of who-knows for who-knows-what."

While the team tried to archive everything, many sites slipped through their fingers. "We know we got a bunch of Geocities sites--a significant percentage, especially of earlier, pre-acquisition data," they said. "We archived it as best we could, we compared notes, we merged and double-checked and did whatever needed to be done with what we happened to have."

Currently the defunct network is still being compressed with around 900 GB of data expected to go into the torrent. Those interested in acquiring the torrent once it goes live can email geotorrent@textfiles.com to get a one-time notification.