Let’s look beyond the specifics for a moment and consider what happened here.

A beloved, useful, free website, run carefully by a competent, honest person for nearly thirty years, was crushed between two features of the new AI economy.

Unsustainable machine traffic hammered it from above, and in all likelihood a financially motivated intruder, operating in a world where breaking into websites has never been easier, took it down.

Bruce’s business and livelihood survived only because the website was not the whole business.

Others have not been so fortunate. Just last week, ZEGO, a German textile firm that had been in business for 37 years, filed for insolvency after a single cyberattack in March shut down its production for six weeks. Unlike The Numbers, they had no other business to fall back on.

The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.

The Numbers is coming back, better built than before. I would encourage you to keep using it, keep supporting it, and, if you are one of the many people who emailed Bruce in fury about a missing page, perhaps send a kinder one now you know why it was missing.

          • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
            2·
            4 days ago

            Oh.

            The Internet itself surely will continue, but yes the “free and open” version is already gone (how to test this: attempt to self-host a website now, like a Lemmy instance, and see how long until AI scrapers bring it to its knees).

            • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
              3·
              4 days ago

              I don’t think so. I think it’s going to fragment a la cyberpunk… It’s beginning already through a mixture of government controls and profiteering. Large enough platforms will still exist everywhere, but I think we’re going to end up with more regional networks

              I think youll still be able to route a package across the world, but the age where you could access the same Internet from everywhere is ending

              • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
                1·
                1 day ago

                eh, i don’t think things’ll have time to regress that far before the pendulum swings back, plus it’s only getting easier to set up your own connections over long distances.

                What i can see disappearing are things like youtube and global multiplayer gaming, because that’s just so incredibly data-heavy. But lightweight stuff like sane websites, forums, chats… that’s quite feasible on something like a globally interconnected mesh. At worst you’ll have to wait a bit for things to load, but like… we would probably benefit from that…