All my WhiteWind posts are now living their best lives in Leaflet format—properly converted, properly structured, and scattered across a few different publications. My main Leaflet, blog.ewancroft.uk, has become home base, while others have branched off into their own corners of the ATmosphere, each with its own tone and focus. I should be celebrating. I should feel that satisfying sense of accomplishment that comes from ticking off a major project.

Instead, I'm sat here feeling… dejected isn't quite the right word, but it's close. Melancholic, perhaps? There's this weird hollow feeling that comes from realising that all the careful work I put into building interconnected content—linking posts to each other, creating these little pathways through my writing—has essentially evaporated into the digital aether.

Link rot. That's what we call it, isn't it? When the web forgets.

The Problem With Digital Permanence

Here's the thing about the internet that nobody really tells you when you're starting out: nothing is permanent, but everything leaves a trace. It's a frustrating paradox. You can scrub a post from existence, migrate platforms, change your entire digital identity, and yet somewhere, in some archive, on some server, there's a ghost of what you created. But the links? The connections between things? Those are fragile as spun sugar.

I spent ages building those connections. When I wrote about my NixOS installation struggles, I linked back to my earlier Linux adventures. When I discussed pattern recognition and neurodivergency, I threaded in references to other posts about special interests and hyperfocus. It felt like I was building a web (pun intended) of my own thoughts—a sort of external brain that people could wander through.

And now? Now those links point to /blog/3lzma3pee742s or whatever alphanumeric string WhiteWind generated, and unless someone's got the exact URL bookmarked or memorised (unlikely, given that even I can barely remember my own DID most days), they're just… broken.

Why This Bothers Me More Than It Should

I know, I know. This is the nature of the beast. When you choose to exist in the ATmosphere—when you embrace the distributed, federated model—you're accepting that things will shift, evolve, sometimes break. That's the trade-off for not being locked into a single corporate platform that could disappear overnight (or, more realistically, pivot to showing you increasingly desperate advertisements between your carefully curated posts).

But here's what's eating at me: I put thought into those links. They weren't just arbitrary "you might also like" suggestions or algorithmic recommendations. Each one was a deliberate choice, a little signpost saying "if you found this interesting, here's where that thread continues." It was my way of saying that my blog isn't just a collection of isolated essays—it's a conversation with myself over time.

And yes, the posts themselves survived the migration intact (mostly—there were a few formatting hiccups with code blocks that I'm still nursing a grudge about). But without the connective tissue, they feel… diminished. Like moving house and realising that whilst all your furniture made it, the familiar routes between rooms are gone, replaced by new floor plans that make you hesitate before you walk through a doorway.

The Irony of Future-Proofing

The real kicker is that I migrated to Leaflet partly for future-proofing. WhiteWind was brilliant—still is brilliant, really—but Leaflet offered better control, cleaner Markdown handling, and a structure that felt more sustainable long-term. I even built a conversion tool specifically to make the migration smoother for myself (and anyone else mad enough to attempt it).

But in trying to future-proof my content, I've inadvertently broken its past. Every internal link that used to work is now a dead end. Every "as I mentioned in this previous post" reference now requires the reader to go hunting manually through my archive. It's like I've carefully preserved all the individual pages of a book but torn out the table of contents and index.

I suppose I could go back through every single post and update the links manually. Point them all to their new Leaflet homes. But Christ, the thought alone exhausts me. The posts I migrated aren't even all there anymore. Some were outdated—tutorials for software versions that no longer exist, rants about problems that have long since been solved—so I binned them. Others got moved to a different Leaflet publication entirely because they didn’t quite fit the vibe of blog.ewancroft.uk. So what was once a single, interconnected space is now several smaller, neater Leaflets—tidier, yes, but collectively fragmented.

The ones that remain reference dozens of other posts, external links, even my own status updates. The scale of the task feels almost Sisyphean—and yes, I'm aware I've already referenced Sisyphus in a different context on this platform, which rather proves my point about wanting these connections to be navigable.

What Link Rot Really Means

Link rot isn't just about broken URLs. It's about the death of context.

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, hyperlinks were revolutionary because they created relationships between discrete pieces of information. You weren't just reading Document A—you could jump to Document B, which referenced Document C, which circled back to Document A with additional context. It was non-linear thinking made manifest—the closest we've come to replicating how human memory actually works (or at least how mine works, all tangents and associative leaps).

But link rot severs those relationships. Suddenly, Document A stands alone, bereft of its connections. The reader is left to puzzle out references they can't follow, inside jokes they're not privy to, arguments that build on foundations they can't see.

And here's the uncomfortable truth: I can't fix this entirely. Even if I dedicate the next fortnight to updating every internal link (which, let's be honest, would be a miserable use of my time), the old WhiteWind URLs are still out there. On Bluesky posts that quoted them. In other people's blog rolls. In the Wayback Machine, probably. Those links will rot regardless of what I do now.

The Bigger Picture

This feels like one of those moments where a personal frustration illuminates a broader systemic problem.

The ATmosphere is amazing. I genuinely believe that. The ability to own your data, to move between services without losing your identity, to exist in a federated space that isn't controlled by a single corporate entity—these are huge wins. But we're still figuring out how to make that work in practice, especially when it comes to the stuff that makes the web web-like: the links, the relationships, the persistent addressing that lets people find things years later.

Maybe the solution is something like persistent identifiers for posts, independent of whatever platform they're currently hosted on. Maybe it's building better tooling for migrations that can automatically update links across your entire archive. Maybe it's accepting that some degree of link rot is inevitable and building our systems to be more resilient to it (though I'm not sure what that would look like in practice).

Or maybe—and this is the bit that makes me a little sad to admit—maybe I need to accept that the web I grew up with, where you could reasonably expect a URL to work five or ten years later, just isn't the web we have anymore. We're in a more fluid, more temporary space now. The links might break, but the content can migrate, evolve, find new homes. Perhaps that's just the trade-off.

Where This Leaves Me

The Leaflet migration is done. My posts are converted, my publications are live, and technically everything works. I should be satisfied with that.

But I'm not, quite. Not yet.

I think what bothers me most is the feeling that I've lost something intangible in the process—not the content itself, but the map I'd drawn through it. All those little wayfinding signs I'd left for readers (and for future me) are gone, and rebuilding them feels like an insurmountable task.

Maybe I'll get to it eventually. Maybe I'll have a weekend where I'm feeling particularly masochistic and I'll open up every post, hunt down every link, and painstakingly update them all to point to their new homes. Or maybe I'll just… leave it. Accept the broken links as a sort of digital scar tissue, evidence of growth and migration.

For now, though, I'm going to sit with this dejection for a bit. Pour another cup of tea. Stare at my nicely migrated Leaflets and feel vaguely dissatisfied with the gaps in the connective tissue.

Because here's the thing about building on the web: you're always building on sand. You can construct something beautiful, something carefully architected, something that works exactly as you intended. But the tide comes in eventually. Links break. Platforms change. URLs rot.

And yet we keep building. Because what else are we going to do?