900GB Geocities torrent - but wish there was an HTML-only "lite" version
ArchiveTeam has decided to do something pretty ballsy: They're releasing a 900GB torrent of all the old Geocities files. Yes, that's right, 900GB. As in 900 gigabytes of data. I have absolutely no idea how long it would take to seed that, much less download it. Will people download it? I won't (I don't have the space,) but others will.
There is, of course, a Reddit thread on this where people are waxing nostalgic all over the place about Ye Olde Geocities.
This is probably the last gasp of life concerning wide acknowledgement that Geocities actually existed. After this it will just be another one of those interesting footnotes in internet history. As it stands right now, only people over 30 truly remember what the original Geocities was like, because Geocities is for all intents and purposes a 90s thing. If you weren't using internet in the 90s, then you really can't understand what it was all about.
I'm not saying that Geocities back in the day was anything wonderful or great. In fact I can't even say it was good. It was just a huge collection of crappy web pages made by people, most of whom had no idea what they were doing. However it was the last bastion of "web 1.0 purity," so to speak. Now the only way to experience those old pages are from Geocities archive sites (like this, this or this) or from downloading the torrent.
I do wish there was a "lite" version of the torrent that was just HTML and nothing else, because I'm 100% sure the bulk of the content (referring to filesize) is not HTML. If a version of the torrent were made that was just web pages alone, I'm betting the torrent size would then be under 200GB. Probably even less because you can compress HTML with 7z like nobody's business since it's just technically text files.
I'm assuming someone could run a script that did something like, "Copy all files from X to Y, keep directory structure but only copy HTM or HTML."
Maybe that will come about sooner or later. Or never. No idea. Many people think it's all about the cheesy animated GIFs when it comes to Geocities. Um, no, it's about the web pages because every single frickin' animated GIF that was on Geocities can be found elsewhere easily.