I cleaned out my dead links

I cleaned out the dead links on my site today. The internet is a great place, in no small part because of its ephemerality. I heard about the dead link checker somewhere online and thought, what the hell, let’s see what it says. There were, broadly, 6 classes of dead links: Links that had never existed, like my fediring and hotline webring links, or the most confusing link of the bunch, https://gary.onl/i-finally-finished-the-internet/, from my Junited 2026 post. I half-remember reading this post and liking it, but as far as I know onl isn’t even a TLD. Weird! Links that did exist but were behind some kind of anti-bot firewall like Cloudflare, Anubis, go-away, etc. This was the bulk of the “dead” links. This one, I get, I mean I had to update my robots.txt to allow the deadlinkchecker bot to crawl my site. Scraping is a scourge, the internet is dead, you know. Now-defunct sites, like linklings.club. I only wrote about them in my May bookmarks post, so it’s a bummer to see them gone so…