Even Archive.org is rather limited in what it keeps. I know of a very large site that recently disappeared. archive only has part of the web html part of the site. Everything else is either gone or non accessible.

> It's the great irony of digital media. Copying data is accurate to the bit and is preserved "as-is", but in practice, it requires someone to maintain servers, to care about it. To separate out what is worth preserving.

This is a bit idealized. In practice copying data is not quite accurate (especially in bulk) and bit-rot is a very real phenomenon, both in flight and in storage.

You sometimes encounter it when dealing with files from the early '00s, it's very common to discover a few of them are corrupt, even if they've only ever been copied between harddrives.

> We hot-linked to all those image hosts because we couldn't imagine them disappearing.

No, we hot-linked all those image hosts because we didn't want to pay to host it ourselves.

Digital Data https://m.xkcd.com/1683/

There are many TinyMUD logs that were posted on Usenet, still to be found on Google Groups.

However, logging was controversial amongst mudders. It was almost always rude to log a private conversation without knowledge or consent; it was tacky to indiscriminately log while everyone was in the "hangout room" or Rec Room, as it were, and it was also bad form to post logs to Usenet or share them without redacting player names and other things.

But logging was built-in to most clients, and it was possible for server administrators to log (and hypothetically any malware-in-the-middle could log the cleartext, unencrypted TinyMUD TCP streams.) And many nefarious deeds by nasty players were exposed to the light when their logs were posted.