This is preservation in the most literal possible sense: the thing being preserved is alive.
Carl’s Friends exists to keep Carl Griffith’s 1847 Oregon Trail sourdough starter in circulation.
The site says more than 108,000 starts have been distributed through it since 2000. The method is gloriously low-tech: volunteers maintain the culture, dry samples, receive mailed requests, and send starter back through the postal system.
The Web handles instructions, history, FAQs, photographs, recipes, and coordination. The yeast and bacteria still travel in envelopes.
Usenet became a preservation society
The story is tied directly to older Internet culture.
Members of the rec.food.sourdough Usenet group formed a preservation effort after Carl Griffith died. The site’s own history describes the group as a creation of the Internet: people who largely did not know each other in real life but shared an interest in keeping the starter alive and freely available.
The site also preserves material from rec.food.sourdough itself. After FAQ maintainer Darrell Greenwood died in 2016, Carl’s Friends copied and relinked the old sourdough FAQ so years of practical discussion would not disappear with a personal site or a dying newsgroup.
That combination makes the project unusually important as Web archaeology.
It preserves both a biological culture and an Internet culture.
The starter has to be fed. The documentation has to be maintained. Mailing instructions change. Volunteers age. Old links break. Postal rates rise. The website records those changes rather than pretending the project exists outside time.
As of fall 2026, the site was still active enough to warn that social-media attention had generated thousands of requests and temporarily overwhelmed distribution.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains plenty of digital artifacts, but few are attached to something you can put in flour and water and watch wake up.
Carl’s Friends turned a website into part archive, part instruction manual, part volunteer network, and part biological relay station.