this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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This is such a big thing. Losing access to content is something we’re seeing en masse and future historians and hobbyists greatly appreciate having historical articles accessible and not lost to the sands of time. I think it would be even better if we could all torrent and archive as well, but accessibility and continued access is appreciated.
Yes but how long until their publisher corporate execs crunch the numbers for the cost of operating the servers and decide it isn't worth it to keep it going?
It sounds like a large crawl should be initiated at archive.ph and archive.org (Wayback Machine) to keep this info available to the public.
Exactly. This is why the internet archive should be a universally publicly-funded endeavor. It's just as important as the world's libraries.
I'm really hoping the internet archive shifts to some distributed P2P type model (IPFS, Tahoe-Lafs etc) where anyone can assign a hard drive as tribute, archive any public webpage on it and it'll be replicated around the world, but still accessible through a single protocol. You can't stop the signal!
History has always been in the hands of the victors. We've finally created a significant exception. But, status quo society doesn't want the responsibility of reasoning out their own decisions or understanding those of others. They'll believe it best to hand their power back to their oppressors. Even if they believe their oppressors "good", they're choosing to enslave greatness to democratic mediocrity. Anything but personal sacrifice.
If you're implying that an essential service should be managed by a private company instead of the government, I'd like you to take a look at the other services we have that are privatized... Like Internet providers and healthcare providers. People are dying because saving them is not profitable. And Comcast absolutely will throttle your connection for their own benefit.
If the Internet archive ever became for-profit, it would absolutely ruin the value of it to the public.
Look at Proton, Wikipedia, or the Internet Archive.
All of which are heavily based on open source software, donations, and in the case of wikipedia, user generated and moderated content.
The solution is not centralization. It's decentralization. A decentralized internet archive could not be held accountable, or taken down, by any individual government. It will remain active and fault tolerant as long as enough users keep enough storage allocated to maintain replication and redundancy. One architected with zero knowledge encryption as the backbone (e.g. IPFS + I2P) could even operate within the jurisdiction of hostile governments.
Finally, someone with some sense.
Decentralization is one way, the most accessible by far. Proton is an example of another way. Yet another is to never scale.