Buddy Icon Archive Preserving the tiny pictures that made the internet personal.

With thanks

Built with a lot of help

With deepest thanks to the Internet Archive, followed by selected software, models, and moderation support that help the Buddy Icon Archive care for its collection.

By Buddy Icon Archive

This is a homemade archive, but it was not made alone. This page thanks the preservationists, developers, maintainers, and model authors whose work makes the archive possible. Individual icons and source collections are credited on their own archive records instead.

The register is intentionally selective. It does not list generic large-company platform infrastructure or paid proprietary services, evaluated alternatives, retired experiments, or every transitive component. Qwen is included because its openly published vision model directly shapes the archive’s descriptions and tags. OpenAI is included because offering capable image-and-text moderation free of charge is a concrete kindness to small projects like this one. Each listed project remains the work of its own maintainers and contributors, under its own terms.

Above all, thank you

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is the most important provider of access to the old web. Its extraordinary preservation work makes this project possible: countless vanished pages, forgotten downloads, and original buddy icons would otherwise be beyond reach.

Our deepest thanks go to the Internet Archive’s staff, contributors, and supporters for keeping the web’s shared history available to everyone.

Pixel-art character with white hair typing at a blue-and-white computer above the words Old Buddy.
Old Buddy, preserved from BadassBuddy

Software

Independent code used by the archive

Pixel-art blue dolphin blowing a pink bubble.

Corpus database

mysql-net/MySqlConnector

Connects the production gallery and server-side workers to their local MySQL catalog.

Pixel-art character running with scissors.

Image handling

SixLabors/ImageSharp

Validates images, inspects animation frames, builds fingerprints, and prepares vision and moderation inputs.

Pixel-art Hacker Buddy working with a folder at a computer.

Embedded SQLite

ericsink/SQLitePCL.raw

Provides the low-level SQLite bridge and bundled native integration used by local catalog work.

Pixel-art Pet Llama on a leash.

Model runtime

ollama/ollama

Runs the local vision-language model used by the enrichment worker behind its Ollama-compatible interface.

Verification

Community projects that help keep it honest

Pixel-art blue scientist holding a beaker.

Test framework

xunit/xunit

The test framework used for the archive’s policy, storage, worker, renderer, and routing checks.

Models

Models and moderation support

Pixel-art green robot with a glowing red eye pressing a button.

Archive enrichment

Qwen3-VL 30B-A3B Instruct

The locally run multimodal model behind the archive’s current qwen3-vl:30b enrichment configuration. It produces descriptions, visible text, structured visual facts, and search tags from still images and animation contact sheets.

Pixel-art yellow shield on a blue background.

Broad moderation

OwenElliott/image-safety-classifier-s

The pinned local ONNX classifier used to score representative animation frames and prioritize detailed safety review. Its score does not set the public verdict by itself.

Pixel-art Lifeguard watching swimmers from a tall chair.

Detailed moderation

OpenAI omni-moderation-latest

OpenAI makes this capable image-and-text moderation model available free of charge. That is genuinely generous: it lets a small preservation project run detailed safety review without turning moderation into a budget tradeoff. Its category flags determine the archive’s current standard-or-sensitive public verdict.