this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Well that’s our fault for letting information get congregated in a centralized service to be fair. Any information that is stored without redundancy on a single service should be considered already lost.
The Fediverse doesn’t fix this by the way, as far as I know. The data can be accessed from other instances, but as I understand it the data still lives on the instance. The day an instance does, poof, all the information it contains goes away.
But! It makes it easier to make information redundant, by having an instance that automatically archives information for example.
We had a problem, many people knew that we had a problem but we did nothing to fix it. We have the same issue on StackOverflow or even GitHub, by the way (although the latter is a bit mitigated by people having local copies of the repositories for example). It will come bite us in the arse one day.
RIP to everything lost on Geocities.
It will never be possible to preserve all information forever, nor do we need to, but we could certainly do better than the usual thus far.
I was glad to be a contributor to the Geocities archival effort.
ArchiveTeam have software called "Warrior" that you can run to help with their archival efforts. I'm running it on a few spare VPSes. It's a Python app and they provide both a VM and a Docker container (you can use either). Their current list of projects is here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Projects#Current_projects. You can pick which ones you want to help with.
Hopefully those communities that choose to stay dark indefinitely will migrate at least some of their information to external platforms for non-reddit access.
I doubt they'd be able/go so far as to export all the threads, but I'm thinking that it'd be nice if the communities with robust and informative wikis would at least make those available elsewhere. Same with the Fediverse too; I feel like any compilation of information like a wiki ought to be hosted elsewhere for some form of redundancy if possible.
Migrating the knowledge is one part but it doesn’t fix the dead links in the search results from major search providers. And, unfortunately, that is a hard problem to solve because a static (or nearly static) page like a wiki on a niche website doesn’t necessarily get the same ranking in the indexer as a community on Reddit would.
Yeah that's true. The only hope at that point would be to copy the search result and plug it into the wayback machine and cross your fingers. If this keeps up, I wonder if the algorithms at Google et al. would start to de-prioritize reddit links over time.