an interactive constellation of the revival and its losses
sky · booting
hover a star · click pins it · space pause · r reseed · s png
A night sky is a census: every star is a place that exists right now, every dark spot is a place that used to. This one is drawn from the reports of the small web — the revival of hand-made sites, the engines built to find them, and the rot that thins them out.
what the sky remembers
A star can die twice. 0.mk was registered in 2009 as "the shortest URL possible: a zero, a dot, two letters", had its first life end in 2014, and came back in 2026 with a staff of exactly zero humans — "This platform has no staff: no support team, moderators, or on-call engineer. AI handles most day-to-day operations, including the words you are reading right now."[1] The returned star rises near its own grave, and a dashed arc reaches back to it.
The toll of the first life was measured when the old database was restored: "Of 655,178 safe, crawlable link records, 76.7% no longer returned a loading page."[2] Link rot is the dark of this sky.
The advice for keeping a star lit is to stop trusting the sky itself: "the web is a performance, not a record, and anything you expect to still be there later has to be saved somewhere you control."[3] That is why the archives constellation exists at all.
Some constellations are built to be found. Marginalia, the independent search engine, describes itself in four words: "Simple technology, no AI."[4]
Human curation still works as a finder. ooh.directory is one person's hand-picked sky: "A collection of 2,433 blogs about every topic."[5]
Even a commercial engine can point away from the big web: Kagi Small Web grew "over 30,000 featured sites" by 2025.[6]
A grave is also a kind of preservation. One site promises its readers a memorial page: "Should this site ever become accidentally abandoned or forgotten...these are the things I would like to be remembered!"[7]
how it was drawn
Twenty-three stars, six constellations: the hosts, the engines, the clubs, the archives, the fallen scattered between them, and the one returned star that rises beside its own grave. Positions come from a seeded random so the sky is reproducible; alive stars twinkle at their own rate, fallen stars keep one severed stub toward their nearest neighbor, and every few seconds a shooting star crosses the sky — link rot, passing. Hover to hear a star's story, click to pin it.