In 2005, a Thai fisherman pulled a 646-pound catfish out of the Mekong. The Herald-Sun in Australia filed the story. The Reuters stringer in Chiang Mai filed it separately. The Bangkok Post did its own version. Three independent wire stories, three photographers, three editorial chains. For a week it was the biggest freshwater fish ever recorded and every outlet with a reporter in Southeast Asia wanted to be on the record with proof.
Twenty years later, I went looking for the original URLs. Of the three I had bookmarked: the Herald-Sun redirects to their paywall homepage, the Reuters URL is a 404, and the Bangkok Post returns a CMS error. The JPEG I had saved back then is the only remaining contemporaneous copy that is not pay-walled. I don't own the image. I'm sure I am technically infringing on Reuters for having it. I also know that if I hadn't saved it, the catfish would functionally not exist.
This is one story among several hundred. The pattern is universal. The pre-2015 web is vanishing faster than most people think, and no one — not the Internet Archive, not Google, not Wikipedia — is preserving the granular weird parts. They're preserving the politically legible parts. Elections. Wars. Market crashes. The 646-pound catfish is below threshold.
Which means: if you want the catfish to exist, you have to save your own copy.
I have been running a private archive of these stories since 2000. About 950 posts, spanning 15 years of news-adjacent web miscellanea — the kind of thing that got filed by regional stringers and survived on archive.org only by accident. Recently I realized that the archive had, without my planning for it, become a kind of asset. Not in the financial sense. In the sense that it contained signal — a decade and a half of what the internet was, before the signal got compressed into a handful of outrage channels and their algorithmic enforcers.
I pulled 200 of the best of them into a book. It's out today. The Odd Decade — ten chapters, two hundred stories, with dates and outlets. It's on Amazon and it's free to subscribers of indignified.substack.com.
But I'm writing this particular post for the Paragraph audience because the deeper point isn't the book. The deeper point is that self-sovereign archiving is the same problem as self-sovereign money, and it has the same solution shape.
Centralized platforms make poor archives — because their incentives decay. A newsroom has ten-year incentives. A PE-backed content farm that acquired the newsroom has eighteen-month incentives. The URL survives only as long as the incentives align.
Aggregated archives (Wayback Machine, Google Cache) cover the famous parts — because they're optimizing for retrieval frequency. The piglet born in Hubei province in 2007 has low retrieval frequency. The piglet will not be in anyone's archive in 2035 unless someone personally saved it.
Decentralized storage is the obvious technical answer — IPFS, Arweave, Filecoin, Nostr relays for small-text items. But the social layer has not caught up. Nobody knows yet what the canonical surface is for "read a short archival news story from 2006." There's a product opportunity there for someone with the patience.
The incentive to archive is individual, but the benefit is collective. Classic public-goods problem. Which is exactly the situation crypto has been best at funding — retroactively. Gitcoin-style retroactive funding for small personal archives is a thing that could exist.
Books are the closest thing we have to a durable archival substrate right now. Physical copies. ISBNs. Library-of-Congress deposit. The Odd Decade being printable-on-demand via KDP means there is now a hardcopy of the glue-huffing macaques and the authorized Unabomber garage sale in the Library of Congress as of this week. Which, honestly, tickles me. The internet couldn't keep them alive. Paper can.
If any Paragraph reader is building tooling for small-scale durable archives — a way for a single writer to publish their decade-and-a-half blog archive onto Arweave with a decent reader-UI on top — I would like to talk to you. My 948-post archive is going somewhere next. The book is one instance of that somewhere. A permanent on-chain copy of the raw archive is another.
I'm at cd@indignified.com.
Until then: save your own copies. Bookmark things with intent. The default trajectory of the pre-2015 web is extinction, and the default trajectory of the post-2015 web is optimization, and neither of those trajectories preserves the specific weird things you'd regret losing.
— CD
The Odd Decade: amazon.com/dp/B0GXZH3MHM. Free at indignified.substack.com. Paragraph-native readers can also mirror a copy via any convenient onchain route; I'm not fussy about where the text lives.