GoKawiilTLDR; get a list of 21,864 domains from the former Yugoslavia’s “.yu” top level domain: download the .CSV
In 2010 the entire domain space of Yugoslavia (.yu) was taken off the internet. After all, the country didn’t exist anymore.
I heard about this from an interview with Kaloyan Kolev on Agnes Bytes’ “Archiving the Web”. Kaloyan had several interesting insights:
We’ve baked the concept of “countries” into the Internet domain system. And that makes domain names tied to real-world territorial conflicts, countries splitting apart and countries going underwater (like Tuvalu)
.yu is an early example of something that will happen more and more often.
It is unfortunate that we didn’t preserve the .yu domain space like a nostalgic Internet memorial to the country. Instead, the sites became unmoored and unreachable.
Kaloyan referred to the research paper “What does the Web remember of its deleted past? An archival reconstruction of the former Yugoslav top-level domain” by Anat Ben-David. In that paper, Ms. Ben-David reconstructed a network graph of .yu domains from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Ben-David’s paper used the below sources as seed lists:
By crawling links from these pages to other .yu URLs, she eventually found 17,460 unique websites in the .yu domain.
The adventure begins
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