I was today days old when I found a website holding formal funerals for the internet I grew up on.
Rip.so is a digital graveyard — a memorial to “the messengers, the social networks, the browsers and the websites the internet forgot.” Eighty-plus entries. Each one gets a tombstone with lifespan dates, a brief epitaph, and its own dedicated memorial page. Some of them hit harder than you expect.
AIM (1997–2017). You spent hours crafting the perfect away message. Someone had your screenname memorized. AOL shut it down five days before Christmas 2017 with two weeks’ notice.
ICQ (1996–2024). The uh-oh sound is instantly recognizable to anyone who was online in 1998. ICQ technically survived until last year — outlasting AIM, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger by years — before it was finally switched off for good. The site’s epitaph: just “uh-oh.”
Adobe Flash (1996–2020). Newgrounds. Homestar Runner. Line Rider. Happy Wheels. There was an entire creative civilization built inside Flash, all of it free, all of it weird, all of it made by someone who just wanted to make something. Chrome killed it gradually. Adobe killed it officially. The games are largely gone.
Google Reader (2005–2013). The best RSS reader ever built, shut down because Google couldn’t figure out how to monetize it. The open web has never really recovered. Rip.so’s epitaph: “the open web has been mourning since.”
GeoCities (1994–2009). Tiled backgrounds. MIDI auto-play. Visitor counters in five-digit fonts. Fifteen million pages of early internet existence — your first website probably lived there — deleted in a single afternoon by Yahoo.
Neopets (1999–2023). Twenty-four years of virtual pets, Flash games, and a mini-economy where someone would trade real money for a Faerie Aisha. Classic Neopets was shut down in 2023 with about as much fanfare as a quiet Tuesday.
Those are just six. There are more than eighty total. Napster. Vine. Friendster. AltaVista. Ask Jeeves. Winamp. Palm Pilot. Club Penguin. Grooveshark. SmarterChild. BlackBerry Messenger. Each one a timestamp for a specific era of internet.
The site itself commits fully to the bit.
Footer reads: best viewed in netscape navigator 4.0 @ 800x600. And: hand-coded in notepad. There is a literal <marquee> tag. A working guestbook where people leave notes for their lost favorites. A webring. The aesthetic is a love letter to the era it’s memorializing, and the commitment to it is total.
There’s also a companion section called “things that survived against odds” — the counterpoint list of internet things that by all rights should have died but didn’t. That list has some surprises too.
Why it’s trending:
Rip.so hit Boing Boing and Hacker News in late April 2026 and the nostalgia reaction was immediate. As of this writing, the visit counter reads 003,142. Which means if you go now, you’re still early.
Open it at rip.so.