The constant re-styling of the page was annoying enough to make me close the tab and not come back.

I'm open to and interested in the thesis and discourse this website supposedly offers, but the medium forcefully expels me.

Perhaps there could be a static 1.0 version we can read or listen to?

edit: Okay, I get it now. It's an automatic aggregator! Only the style auto-change is egregious then, but the actual webapp is great!

another edit, sorry: The call-to-action button should be at the top, not the bottom. On mobile you have to scroll to see it and it can be missed.

> alive internet theory is a séance with this living internet. Resurrecting tens of millions of digital artifacts from the Internet Archive, visitors are immersed in a relentless barrage of human expression as they travel through the life of the web as we created it—every image, video, song, and text uploaded by a real person on the web.

I like this a lot. It sort of turns internet history into a lava lamp.

For those struggling with the styling on the splash page, the slider at the top lets you pick an era and stick with it.

I like the sentiment but how will you know as time goes on that the things were uploaded or created by real humans? The early things yes, but as I got closer to now I was less sure, which kind of disproves the alive internet theory.

https://archive.org/details/TikTok-7272243823504313642

That's exactly my kind of humor: the page "aliveitheorie" remains black because I'm not allowing a Java script.

I agree that "the internet will always be filled with real people: looking for each other". The question is will they be able to successfully find each other, and how can they be sure they have?

Its a cool idea, just beware. Saw some dead kids and some NSFW among the otherwise interesting content.

This must be labeled NSFW.

Somehow, reading the comments made something CLICK for me about how passive and reactive we have all become in this culture.

1. The issue is real. Not sure it is articulated but I related to live vs dead internet.

2. The comments (only 10 as of now) are mostly critiques. (no javascript, call to action, style, theory is wrong)

The CLICK: "Critiques kill". You want a live internet? Don't critique. If you want a no javascript version make one. If you have a better solution do it. If you have insight into the problem share it.

The "follower" internet has somehow instilled the notion that making a comment is the same as "doing something". It is not.

Someone has done something here. If you want to comment, try to develop the thought, not critique. Help build something.

people forget that even before LLMs, the Internet was already shit. a third was SEO slop by ESL thirdworlders, another third - a kulturkampf battlefield. looking for the good parts had never been easy.

Is it even more proof that the Internet is dead, that we are now in the Nostalgia Phase. Looking back fondly at what it once was.

Awful site, this is just a strawman. The dead Internet theory does not claim that real people do not upload things to the Internet, there was never any doubt about that.

The site has absolutely no grasp on what "dead Internet theory" is or what it claims.

>every image, video, song, and text uploaded by a real person on the web.

Which is then followed by a barage of mostly historical photos. Which is very weird, since these historical photos are certainly automatically uploaded from archives and are not some authentic individual expressions by individual Internet users, which makes the whole thing fully orthogonal to both claims.

Dead Internet theory in its original statement is the claim, that most users of the Internet are consumers who mostly read discussions, but do not participate. The small part of users who are actively participating are then engaged by "bots", supposedly to further certain agendas by the creators of the bots, like manufacturing a consensus or deliberately creating infighting.

If you just skim through the linked Wikipedia article you will immediately understand that this thesis can not be disproven by any amount of uploaded archive material.

I like this, makes me wonder what a curated internet by a benevolent dictator could offer.

Isn't the fact that most of the material comes from the Internet Archive somewhat a refutation of the Alive Internet Theory, which is that the internet is alive now, as opposed to some past archived point in time? (yes, I know the IA archives contemporary materials, but the purpose and majority of the content are from the past)

Seems more 'undead' than alive given the methodology.

Haven't read the rest of the site but I really enjoyed the way you present it using the slider with the prevalent styles of certain periods

Algorithmic internet can be eventually filled with bots and AI. But when you curate your own follow list you are pretty much immune.

Uh, definitely NSFW. Did not expect to see porn and other questionable graphic material. I mean, that is what I remember from the "alive internet", so it's not wrong perhaps, but maybe should be flagged as such.

Reminds of http://astronaut.io/

Previously discussed here, for example

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20432772 (1362 points by monort on July 14, 2019, 239 comments)

Still, idea appeals to me, being able to pull some random content from a different place than a social media feed is a feature in itself today...

but I agree with the other commenter that it doesn't have much to do with the Dead Internet theory.

I got shown these when I checked 2025 content:

https://archive.org/details/1000072932 (ad slop)

https://archive.org/details/img-7545_202504 (reddit image share upload, seems like the uploader is just a guy using archive.org as personal media storage)

Well, the second one is certainly human content! Like with astronaut.io, it quickly feels stalky browsing through some of the uploads there, as if people didn't mean them to be public... but well, I've used archive.org myself, luckily it's easy to delete stuff there when you uploaded things by accident.

tangent: maybe people using archive.org as a personal media hoster poses bigger long-term risks for them than many other concerns...

tangent 2: just tried out using Gemini to analyze the JS bundle of this React app and determine how it chooses the items to load, and that seemed to went surprisingly well! Brief double-check of the prettified bundle in the inspector seems to confirm it got things roughly right, and it was able to describe what the app does from the minified code.

I split the script, omitted the React and react-router bundles and pasted the rest of the code in 2 prompts, plus another one for the analytics JS file, and it was just 2.5 Flash, not even an especially good model or AI studio.

that impressed me!