Wholeheartedly agree. It's sad to slowly see the bitrot in my own bookmarks, trying to pull up important resources or media from only a few years ago only to hit a 404 or domain placeholder. And many times there is nothing on Archive.org or similar.

That ArchiveWeb extension looks excellent for custom captures. Picking the pages and elements you want during capture is a great feature.

For quicker one-offs, SingleFile gives you a single HTML with all the media of a page: https://www.getsinglefile.com

If you're making archiving a more involved part of your workflow, I highly recommend ArchiveBox. It can save pretty much every type of file from everywhere, in almost every format you can imagine, while building a searchable index of the archives. Been using it successfully for many years: https://archivebox.io

one of the great tragedies of my life was when https://buthowdoitknow.com/ went offline, taking the visual emulator with it

i managed to reconstruct (and then improve) it with an LLM:

https://scott-cpu.cs.montana.edu/

Over the summer, I had the urge to do this with a few favorite blogs. wget did the trick for static content

Another great writeup about backing up websites: https://gwern.net/archiving

https://hister.org/ is a neat website indexing and archival tool.

I recently spent a few days trying to figure out and discover my old websites and things from the early 2000s on the web archive. I hadn't realised my memory had gone quite so bad, but it was revitalising to find some of what I'd forgotten. So much of what I do remember is long dead and missing, sadly.

I thought it might be rose-tinted glasses, thinking that the earlier internet was better, but spending time retracing my teenage steps made me even more certain that it was indeed better. So many derpy little websites made by nerds, so many fun games and websites that weren't preying on vulnerable people, and everything spread out across many places - not centralised in the hands of large corporations. I've been using LLMs to have fun recreating concepts from that time, like my own forum software, as some sort of anti-progress. It's been fun.

In 5 years, cloud LLMs may have largely replaced the open Internet as a source of information, with centralized control and ability to rewrite the past.

Please, please buy books and keep them in good condition, and please archive websites with important information (assuming it's legal in your jurisdiction). There are still plenty of excellent sites and blogs around from the 2000s and even earlier, but they won't be there forever. Ironically, coding agents have made archival much easier -- I've always found problems with using pre-written tools, but Claude or Qwen make it trivial to download, test, and archive sites on your local.

Have a look at Hister [1], a 'personal web history search engine' which by way of extensions for browsers captures your web history and stores actual page content on your own instance where it can be browsed and searched. It does not store images so if that's what you're mostly interested in it won't work for you. For text is works quite well, maybe sometimes too well since it also stores ephemeral things like HN comment pages unless you tell it not to.

[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/hister/

the last source of truth are forums.. but not reddit... if it has a CEO it will rot and enshitify.

I'm talking about forums... the bmw forum for your old car... the motorcycle forum for the enthusiast of the SV650... those places are full of anecdotes, people talking, lending a hand to another person... being humans and care...

Which is what social media is/should/was about, is what internet is about before the enshitification happened... I would vote to have this ID associated to you via check of your local goverment issued id and ONLY UPPON VERIFICATION of you being using that you can log and read and use those websites without tracking you (Yes 10,000 ifs where this is secure, handled in a confidential matter, the whole tech is not to track that you are doing something... but that a human is behind that, no api, no robot, no adds, no nothing... just the old school forum where you can go, talk, submit a photo... where someone who wanted to spend time to write something did it, SO WE CAN ENSURE TWO THINGS, A HUMAN IS THERE, AND NO FVK!NG CEO WILL ENSHITIFY IT, no to track people, but to know that a person is interacting there)

But because "empathy is the weakness" and shareholder value...

Yes, and with AI you can even back up the logic behind a website (the back-end), and even generate fake but plausible data to fill it.