GeoCities got online in 1992, and at the height of its popularity it hosted an estimated 38 million pages, containing 186 million documents, created by seven million people. It was bought by Yahoo in 1999.

People did not like the merger.

Ian Milligan dissects GeoCities as a modern archive in his book “History in The Age of Abundance.” Between 1674 and 1913 in England there was a journal called the Old Bailey. These were court documents detailing arrest records, public charges, etc. For a long time the Old Bailey was the largest public record of everyday people available.
Milligan's point is that since the Old Bailey, GeoCities is the largest form of public archive ever. It contained a staggering amount of information that, unlike the Old Bailey, was generated by the people it pertained to.

Ten years after Yahoo bought GeoCities, the platform and everything on it was erased.

In 2015, artist and net-historian Olia Lialina began an ongoing project called Give me time/This page is no more. She took pages that were specifically about the closure of GeoCities and exhibited them as 35mm slides in a few museums.

GeoCities was a non-commercial, ad-free, and now completely obsolete form of online communication. That is pretty rare these days. The websites that people made were amateur. They document personal ongoings...

but also Masonic orders in Canada,

the artistic process,

and also Jessica's Place.

Milligan quotes Jason Scott, one of the archivists who preserved two terabytes of Geocities pages. He says, "To browse among these artifacts is to find a cross-section of humanity...At a time when full-color printing for the average person was a dollar per-printed-page proposition and a pager was the dominant (and expensive) way to be reached anywhere, mid 1990s web pages offered both a worldwide audience and a near-unlimited palette of possibility."

Jason Scott leads a group called Archive Team. Founded in 2009, Archive Team states on it's wiki page that, "It's intended to prevent misunderstandings in the future, and to enable people to focus on adding to the entries without needlessly inefficient battles and in-fighting."

A lot has changed since 2009, but what Archive Team describes in terms of how we contextualize our history is an entirely timely argument. As of March 14th, 2025 The New Yorker reports, "Oblivion menaces every scrap of information that doesn’t spark joy in the Oval Office. 'It’s gone,' Trump said of 'wokeness,' during his recent address to Congress, in almost motherly tones. 'And we feel so much better for it, don’t we? Don’t we feel better?'"

What do we preserve? How do we maintain?