TXTI.es Exploration
TXTI.es was a plaintext, minimalist webpage host operating somewhere between the functions of Neocities
and Pastebin. It ran from 2014-2023, before announcing it's closure, deleting all images, and finally closing
in 2024 after a decade of accumulating internet detritus. I saved as many pages as I could find via google
and random keyword searching. Can't sleep so let's see what's in the abyss.
There's like a bajillion bios & DNIs:
I think most of these are from Twitter? Maybe some from VK and other social media
less popular in America.
Some bizarre spam:
A lot of this stuff. I don't know who made it or why it exists, and a lot seems to be
straight out of a Markov chain. Maybe it's like ipsum lorem text for a future site?
Some is weird ad spam, but most is nonsense, not even SEO manipulation or anything
"useful."
Odd fragments:
...I don't think that's how the poem goes.
Now this is the kind of thing I'm here for. Where are these people now? Why did they do this?
I think about them all the time. This kind of thing is like accidental poetry to me.
Tiny ephemera of other lives, discarded and found and now preserved in all their fragmentary glory.
Means nothing and everything.
My personal favorites so far:
/grass.html seems to be a diary or chat log shared between two people and likely never intended to be seen by anyone else.
/nothing.html is the philosophical musings of someone probably on the brink of enlightenment.
/wintermute.html is about algorithmic manipulation and the dead internet.
There's 705 pages saved here;
and a metric fuckton on the Wayback Machine.
Ultimately though, I don't think there was any real effort to save TXTI.es. AFAIK it went unnoticed
by the Archive Team and I couldn't find posts by anyone else trying to preserve it. It seemed to live
and die quietly. There's a certain beauty in that, though.