HISTORY

del.icio.us: what is actually left, and what can still be got out

The service that defined social bookmarking passed through five owners in fourteen years and was never deleted. This is its observable state today, checked rather than remembered.

Published 2026-08-06 · Updated — · 2,920 words · 14 sources · Status of facts checked 2026-08-06

The ownership chain is the part that gets repeated: Yahoo bought del.icio.us in 2005, a leaked Yahoo product slide in December 2010 put it in a column headed “sunset”, and Pinboard bought it in 2017 and made it read-only. All three are documented, and dated, below. None of them answers the question people actually arrive with, which is whether a collection saved in 2008 can still be got back. That question has a checkable answer, and the answer is different for different accounts.

What follows is an inventory of the observable position on 2026-08-06: what the two domains return to a request, what the operator states on the service’s own help page, what the archive holds, and where the registration stands. Every status below carries the date it was checked.

What answers a request, 2026-08-06

Read-only A request to http://del.icio.us/ on 2026-08-06 returns HTTP 301 to the HTTPS form, with an Apache/2.4.18 (Ubuntu) server header. The HTTPS host presents a leaf certificate with the common name del.icio.us, issued by Let’s Encrypt on 2021-02-03 and expired on 2021-05-04; a default-configured command-line client refused the connection on certificate validation. With validation disabled, the response is HTTP 200 and 1,157 bytes: a page titled del.icio.us carrying a username field, a password field, an empty hidden token, a link to a password-reset path and a link to /help. There is no bookmark on it. The Wayback Machine’s most recent capture of that page in the sample used here is dated 2026-08-04.¹²

The rest of the surface, checked the same day, is narrower than the login form suggests:

/help — HTTP 200, 3,689 bytes. The only page of prose the service serves.
/forgot/, the password-reset path linked from the login form — HTTP 200, 1,218 bytes, headed You Forgot, stating that a password recovery feature is being worked on, that there is no estimated date, and that email about it will be ignored.
Any username path, and any unrecognised path — HTTP 302 to /forbidden, which itself answers HTTP 200 with a ten-byte body reading Forbidden.
/tag/ followed by any tag — HTTP 200 with a forty-byte body stating that user and tag pages are not implemented yet.
/rss/, /post and /popular/ — HTTP 200 with a ten-byte body reading Not found.
/api/v1/posts/all — HTTP 404. A DNS query for the subdomain api.del.icio.us returned NXDOMAIN.

Two things follow that are worth separating. First: no export endpoint was reachable without an account on 2026-08-06, and no public bookmark page of any kind. Second: almost none of those failures announce themselves as failures. A missing page returns 200 with a one-word body, which is the textbook shape of a soft 404 — a bulk link-checker recording status codes alone would score every dead del.icio.us profile in a collection as alive.

Five sales in fourteen years

del.icio.us was launched in 2003 by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov and popularised both tagging and the phrase “social bookmarking.” Wikipedia, cited here as a secondary source, gives the launch as September 2003.³ The Pinboard acquisition post of 2017-06-01 states that the site took funding from Union Square Ventures in 2005 and that it had by then been sold five times.¹

2005-12-09 — Yahoo. The price was never officially disclosed. The “$15–$30M” range that circulates is the 2017 acquirer’s own retrospective phrasing in that post;¹ the flat figures $20 million and $30 million have no primary source and are listed at the unverified register.
2010-12-16 — the “sunset” slide. A leaked internal Yahoo product slide placing Delicious in a column headed “sunset” was posted publicly. TechCrunch’s report of that day carries an update recording Delicious’s response that the service was not shutting down and that a home for it outside the company was being sought.⁴ No intention is asserted here, and this publication does not name the person who posted the slide: that same report names two different people in two different roles, and which of them posted it first could not be verified.
2011-04-27 — AVOS Systems, the company of the YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.³
2014-05 — Science Inc. FinSMEs reported the acquisition of Delicious from AVOS on 2014-05-11.⁵
2016-01 — Delicious Media, described by TechCrunch on 2016-01-12 as a new alliance between Domainersuite and Science Inc., which rolled back the most recent product changes.⁶
2017-06-01 — Pinboard. The announcement states that Delicious would go read-only on 2017-06-15, with no new bookmarks and no API after that date, that the site would stay online, that migration to a Pinboard account cost $11 a year at the time, and — the line that matters most for what came after — that there was no time pressure to move off. It also records that the export link had been disabled some months earlier for performance reasons and would be repaired, and puts the collection at over a billion bookmarks.¹ No price is stated in that post; figures that circulate for it could not be verified.

That is the chain everyone recites. On its own it produces the wrong expectation, because it describes custody of a company and says nothing about access to a record.

The bytes stopped changing in February 2021

The Wayback Machine’s CDX index answers a question no narrative does: when the site last changed. Between 2021-02-04 and 2026-08-04 the index records 1,829 captures of https://del.icio.us/ returning HTTP 200. Of those, 1,824 carry one of exactly two content digests. The remaining five are all dated 2021-02-04 itself, and the later of the two surviving digests first appears in a capture timestamped 2021-02-04 at 15:08 UTC.⁸ Retrieved 2026-08-06.

The help page tells the same story one week later: from 2021-02-08 to the most recent capture in the sample, 2025-12-16, every distinct-digest 200 capture of /help alternates between two values.^a

Set that beside the certificate issued on 2021-02-03 and the picture is consistent and dull in the way real evidence usually is: the last dated evidence of anything on that host being changed falls in the first week of February 2021, and the document it serves has not changed since. It has presented an expired certificate for more than five years. The archive kept recording 200s through 2026-08-04 while a default-configured command-line client refused the same connection on 2026-08-06 — a difference in whether the client validates the certificate, not in what the server returns. A reader’s browser validates, which is why the site that “is still up” will not open without an explicit override.

What the operator states on the help page

The single page of prose at del.icio.us/help, retrieved 2026-08-06, is written and signed by Maciej Cegłowski, who also runs Pinboard. It is a primary source about the custody of the data, and it is more specific than any secondary account of the acquisition. Paraphrased, and attributed to that page throughout:²

The site is described as a read-only archive of the bookmarking website del.icio.us, and as an online museum.
The only operation available is to log in and retrieve old data, by way of an export link. Search and global tag pages are named as things to be added as time permits — which matches the forty-byte answer at /tag/ five years later.
No password-recovery flow exists. The page says one will be set up eventually and gives the reason for the delay: the volume of automated traffic the site receives, and reluctance to give that traffic the power to send email. The live /forgot/ page says the same thing in the same terms (checked 2026-08-06).
Accounts will not be deleted.
The data behind the login is incomplete, and the page says so. It states that when Yahoo sold del.icio.us to AVOS there was a stipulation that users had to opt in to have their data transferred, and that for a really old account — the page says pre-2010 — whose owner did not consent at the time, the current custodian does not hold the data at all.

Two notes on that last point. The help page dates the AVOS sale to 2010; the acquisition is dated 2011-04-27 in the secondary record.³ The discrepancy is left unresolved here rather than smoothed over, because the cut-off it implies for a former user differs by a year depending on which date is right. And the consent event itself — which users opted in, and what happened to the records of those who did not — could not be verified from any source other than that page.

One small thing sits oddly with the rest. The help page ends with a contact address; the visible text reads support@del.icio.us, but the underlying mailto target is support@del.ico.us — a different domain, missing a letter, which returned SERVFAIL to a DNS query on 2026-08-06. Mail addressed to the domain that is actually spelled correctly has somewhere to go: the MX record for icio.us gives idlewords.com (checked 2026-08-06). Mail sent by clicking the link on the page does not.

The two domains went in different directions

Gone The service did not spend its life at one address. Wikipedia, again as a secondary source, dates the redesign that renamed the site to 2008-07-31, with the domain moving to delicious.com after it, and dates the move back to del.icio.us to 2016-04-24.³ Only one of the two addresses was kept.

A CDX query for delicious.com filtered to status 200 returns zero captures between 2017-01-01 and 2021-01-10 (retrieved 2026-08-06).⁸ For four years the host did not answer with a page. The first 200 capture after that gap is dated 2021-01-11 and is an online-gambling landing page; several of the captures from that day carry Indonesian-language gambling-brand fragments in the requested URL. Captures sampled at 2022-12-19, 2023-06-01 and 2024-05-31 all carry the title “DeliciousAI - Transform Selfies & Pets Photos into AI Art”; captures sampled at 2025-05-31 and 2025-12-01 are HTTP 302s to a domain marketplace. The capture of 2026-08-05 is titled “Delicious — Daily Meal Plans, Menus & Recipes” and offers a meal-planning product with a pricing page and a free tier.¹⁰ A live request on 2026-08-06 returned HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare challenge, so the current page could not be read by an automated request and the archive capture is the evidence used here. None of these addresses is linked from this page.

The consequence for anyone following an old citation is exact. A 2009 link to a profile at delicious.com now points into a live commercial site that has nothing to do with bookmarking. The link is not broken. It resolves, it returns a page, and an automated audit will pass it. This is the failure mode that makes link rot hard to measure: the dead links that announce themselves are the easy half.

The registration, and the claim that it lapsed

On 2026-06-15, in a Hacker News thread about pinboard.in going NXDOMAIN, a commenter posting as cpswan wrote that a WHOIS lookup showed pinboard.in expiring that day, and that the same appeared to have happened to del.icio.us, which had expired on 2026-05-02.⁹ That comment is the only source located for the del.icio.us half of the claim, which is carried for that reason at the unverified register.

The pinboard.in half was answered in the same thread on the same day. An account posting as idlewords, writing as the site’s operator, stated that the domain had been set to auto-renew, that something went wrong, that no registrar notice arrived, and that the registration had been renewed.¹³ That statement concerns pinboard.in and says nothing about the del.icio.us registration.

The del.icio.us claim is checkable, with one wrinkle. del.icio.us is not a registrable domain: it is a host under icio.us, which is why a WHOIS lookup for the full name returns the .us registry’s own record and tells a reader nothing (checked 2026-08-06). Querying the registry’s RDAP service for icio.us on 2026-08-06 returns three dated events: registration 2002-05-03, last changed 2026-06-17, and expiration 2027-05-02.¹¹

Stated flat: the current expiry is one year to the day after the date the comment gave, and the record was last changed two days after the thread. The name resolved on 2026-08-06, by CNAME to icio.us and on to a single IPv4 address, with nameservers at Gandi. Whether the registration ever actually lapsed could not be verified — RDAP publishes the current expiry, not the previous one. What can be stated is that it is registered now and paid through 2027-05-02. For comparison, an RDAP query for pinboard.in on 2026-08-06 gives registration 2009-06-15, last changed 2026-07-30 and expiration 2027-06-15.

What this means for someone who had an account

The position resolves into conditions, not advice. Each is stated as a rule about the object, and each is checkable by the reader against the sources above.

An account whose password is known has an export. The help page states that logging in and using the export link is the way to retrieve data. What the export contains, and in what format, could not be verified: it sits behind an authentication wall, and this publication holds no account on the service.
An account whose password is not known has nothing. No password-recovery flow has been built, per the help page, whose 200 captures since 2021-02-08 carry only two distinct digests, and per the live /forgot/ page on 2026-08-06. There is no working contact link on the help page itself.
An account from before the AVOS transfer may never have been included. Per the same page, data for old accounts whose owners did not opt in was not transferred, and the current custodian does not hold it.
Nothing was deleted, and that is not the same as recoverable. This is the useful distinction and the one the ownership chain hides. Ma.gnolia lost its users’ collections to a database and filesystem failure on 2009-01-30, and its founder announced on 2009-02-17 that the data was irretrievable; del.icio.us kept every collection and stopped serving a door. For a user with a forgotten password the two outcomes are, in 2026, indistinguishable at the point of use.

Checks a reader can repeat

As of 2026-08-06, the following are the queries used above, in a form that operates on a reader’s own account name. They run against the Internet Archive’s public CDX Server API⁷ and require no account. Replace USERNAME and keep request volumes modest; the service returns HTTP 503 to a client that queries it too quickly.

Profile pages on the original host: http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=del.icio.us/USERNAME&matchType=prefix&filter=statuscode:200&collapse=digest&output=json
Profile pages on the later host, which is where accounts lived between 2008 and 2016: http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=delicious.com/USERNAME&matchType=prefix&filter=statuscode:200&collapse=digest&output=json
The per-user RSS feed, which is the machine-readable option: http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/USERNAME&matchType=prefix&filter=statuscode:200&collapse=digest&output=json

An empty JSON array means no capture was recorded for that prefix, which is the common result: the archive captured the profiles of accounts other pages linked to, and most accounts were never linked to. Where captures do exist, a row’s fourteen-digit timestamp retrieves the original bytes at https://web.archive.org/web/TIMESTAMPid_/URL — the id_ suffix suppresses the archive’s own toolbar and rewriting.

Two limits, both material. A captured profile page holds only the bookmarks that were on that page at that moment, typically the most recent screenful; paginated pages were captured erratically or not at all. And a captured feed is a window, not a record. In the capture examined for this article — the feed of the corporate account named adobe, captured 2009-02-17 and retrieved 2026-08-06 — the requested URL carried a count=15 parameter and the response contained fifteen item elements, each with a title, a link, a publication date, a globally unique identifier, a creator and one or more category elements carrying that bookmark’s tags. No per-item description element was present, so any note the user had written is not in that feed.¹⁴ Recovering a collection this way means stitching together separate captures taken on separate dates, and the result is a sample rather than a record.^b

Where to find it now

del.icio.us Read-only: Online and answering on 2026-08-06, serving a login form, a help page and a password-reset notice, and nothing else. Read-only since 2017-06-15. Data was not deleted. An export exists behind the login; no password recovery exists. Certificate expired 2021-05-04. Last recorded change to the homepage’s bytes: 2021-02-04. Wayback holds captures from 2003-10-04 onward, the most recent in this sample dated 2026-08-04.
delicious.com Gone: The bookmarking service at this address is gone. No capture of the domain root returned HTTP 200 between 2017-01-01 and 2021-01-10. The address has since carried at least three unrelated businesses; as of the 2026-08-05 capture it serves a meal-planning product. Captures of the bookmarking site, including user profile pages from 2008–2016, remain in the Wayback Machine and are the only public copies of those pages.
Per-user data on shutdown: Login-walled. Migrated to no successor service by default; users were offered a paid Pinboard account in 2017 and told there was no time pressure. Nothing was erased. Accounts predating the AVOS transfer whose owners did not opt in were, per the operator’s help page, never transferred in the first place.
The old API: Gone. The API stopped accepting requests on 2017-06-15 per the acquisition announcement. api.del.icio.us returned NXDOMAIN on 2026-08-06, and /api/v1/posts/all returns 404.
Third-party copies: Wayback captures of profile pages and of feeds.delicious.com RSS feeds, retrievable by the CDX queries above. An export a user took before 2017 is the only copy of that collection held outside the service; what such an export contained could not be verified here.

References

Cegłowski, Maciej. “Pinboard Acquires Delicious.” Pinboard Blog, 2017-06-01. https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
“del.icio.us / help.” del.icio.us, n.d. https://del.icio.us/help — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
“Delicious (website).” Wikipedia, n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) — retrieved 2026-08-06. Cited as a secondary source. ↩
Tsotsis, Alexia. “Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? [Update: Del.icio.us Responds].” TechCrunch, 2010-12-16. https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/is-yahoo-shutting-down-del-icio-us/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
“Science Acquires Delicious from AVOS Systems.” FinSMEs, 2014-05-11. https://www.finsmes.com/2014/05/science-acquires-delicious-from-avos-systems.html — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
Lardinois, Frederic. “Delicious, Former Web 2.0 Darling, Is Now Managed By New Alliance, Rolls Back Most Recent Changes.” TechCrunch, 2016-01-12. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/12/delicious-former-web-2-0-darling-is-now-managed-by-new-alliance-rolls-back-most-recent-changes/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
Internet Archive. “Wayback CDX Server API — BETA.” GitHub, n.d. https://github.com/internetarchive/wayback/blob/master/wayback-cdx-server/README.md — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
Internet Archive. CDX index queries for del.icio.us and delicious.com, n.d. https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx — queried 2026-08-06. ↩
cpswan. Comment on “Pinboard’s DNS registration has expired” (item 48541313). Hacker News, 2026-06-15. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48541313 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
Internet Archive. Capture of delicious.com, 2026-08-05. https://web.archive.org/web/20260805224541/https://delicious.com/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
Registry Services, LLC. RDAP record for icio.us, n.d. https://rdap.nic.us/domain/icio.us — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
Internet Archive. Capture of del.icio.us, 2026-08-04. https://web.archive.org/web/20260804190248/https://del.icio.us/ — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
idlewords. Comment on “Pinboard’s DNS registration has expired” (item 48547197). Hacker News, 2026-06-15. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547197 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩
Internet Archive. Capture of feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/adobe?count=15, 2009-02-17. https://web.archive.org/web/20090217062724/http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/adobe?count=15 — retrieved 2026-08-06. ↩

Notes

A trap worth naming, because it produces wrong numbers in exactly this kind of analysis: the length field in a CDX row is not the size of the document. For the del.icio.us homepage, the rows for captures between 2026-07-25 and 2026-08-04 report values between 968 and 1,075, while the live document measured 1,157 bytes on 2026-08-06. Comparing the two as though they were the same quantity is a mistake. ↩
Nothing above should be read as a route to another person’s saved links. The archive captured public profile pages and public feeds because they were public at the time; a reader querying their own account name is retrieving a copy of a page they published. This publication reproduces no bookmark, note or profile from any service. ↩