TIL Bad Habits Can Create Unforeseen Insights

I have the bad habit to many tabs open in my browsers, on the Web and on Gemini. And by many I mean hundreds. Yes, seriously.

I think I started this habit in the late 1990s while still being on dial-up. Pages loaded slowly and I rather clicked one promising link after the other on a SERP to load in a new tab in the background than to follow a link, navigate back, and follow another link.

For various reasons, every once in a while I have to save all those tabs in bookmark folders to be able to close them and open them later again. Sometimes I forget to delete those bookmark folders and save the tabs again after a couple of weeks or months, depending on the circumstances.

Today I exported all my bookmarks, about 5,000, to another browser to utilize a plugin to delete duplicates and check for broken links. Some plugins even have the ability to detect redirects, which then can be automatically applied to the saved bookmarks. Very nice.

I was able to delete more than 500 duplicated bookmarks and fixed a lot of redirects.

Unfortunately there were still a lot of bookmarks with unknown errors, maybe 60 to 70. Those were unresolvable domains. Domains, which have been disconnected. Granted, some bookmarks have been ten years old or more, but there wasn’t just a lot of link rot, which couldn’t be fixed by redirects, but also many abandoned blogs, tutorials, product pages, websites, even whole companies.

And then I realized, that the perceived link rot and abandonment of capsules in the Geminispace is not so bad after all. It’s a natural progression, which happens all the time. We just take it for granted, that the Internet is there for posterity, because it seems effortless and inexpensive to keep things around. Collectively, especially considering the climate disaster we are heading for, it has a price.