About

Way Back When

Way Back When is a portal into forgotten internet culture. It uses public archival links from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to help people rediscover old websites, blogs, scenes, and digital artifacts.

Every click opens a snapshot from a different era of the web — before the algorithm, before the feed, before everything looked the same.

This project is unofficial and not affiliated with the Internet Archive or archive.org. All archived content is served via the Wayback Machine's public infrastructure.

How it works

→A curated list of seed sites is filtered by your era and category preferences
→A random year is selected from within the site's preferred era range
→The Wayback Machine is queried for the closest archived snapshot
→If found, the archive URL is surfaced for you to explore in a new tab
→If no snapshot exists, the app automatically tries up to 3 different seeds

Add more sites

The seed list lives in data/seeds.ts. Each entry is a domain with a category, vibes, and optional preferred year range. Open that file and follow the instructions at the top.

Way Back When is a dead-web archive portal created by TOi under the (U)ni System.