GoKawiilJuly 25, 2026 · Updated August 11, 2026
An old 0.mk database backup held 657,958 links created between 2009 and 2014, along with their click counts. We restored 657,607 of those records as pre-2015 links and followed every destination in August 2026. Of 655,178 safe, crawlable link records, 76.7% no longer returned a loading page.
Most 0.mk users were in Macedonia, so this is not a census of the entire web. It is a large surviving record of what one online community shared during that period, including local news, personal blogs, photo hosts, forums, and the major platforms of the time.
When 0.mk started in 2009, it was a passion project built by a team of three. We worked on it when we could, usually for a few hours a week around our regular jobs. Seventeen years later, one of us found an old database backup on a disk and decided to bring it back.
Here is what those six years of link creation look like, with the long silence after them:
2009: 3,668 links 2009 4k 2010: 20,283 links 2010 20k 2011: 103,053 links 2011 103k 2012: 23,148 links 2012 23k 2013: 224,931 links 2013 225k 2014: 282,524 links 2014 283k 2026: 404 links 2026 404 Raw link records, not users. The 2011 spike includes one 83,398-link batch; 97.8% of 2013 records and 99.9% of 2014 records are not attached to a recovered account. The green sliver is the 2026 relaunch.
The survival test
The crawl covers all 657,607 restored link records dated through December 2014. We excluded 2,429 records whose targets were malformed, internal, credentialed, or policy-blocked, leaving 655,178 crawlable historical links:
Could not connect: 51.24% HTTP error: 25.44% Loaded: 23.32% 51.24 % could not connect ( DNS, timeout, TLS ) 25.44 % http error ( 4xx / 5xx ) 23.32 % loaded ( 2xx / 3xx response )
Even that 23.3% overstates how much survived. A login wall, a parked domain full of ads, or a "this content is no longer available" notice all count as loading. A working page does not mean the original content is still there.
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