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The Internet Is Failing The Website Preservation Test (archive.ph)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This is something that keeps me worried at night. Unlike other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets, information on the Internet can just blink into nonexistence when the server hosting it goes offline. This makes it difficult for future anthropologists who want to study our history and document the different Internet epochs. For my part, I always try to send any news article I see to an archival site (like archive.ph) to help collectively preserve our present so it can still be seen by others in the future.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

even beyond what you said, even if we had a global blockchain based browsing system, that wouldnt make it easier to keep the content ONLINE. If a website goes offline, the knowledge and reference is still lost, and whether its a URL or a blockchain, it would still point towards a dead resource.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It would make it much easier to keep content online, as everybody could mirror content with close to zero effort. That's quite opposite to today where content mirroring is essentially impossible, as all the links will still refer to the original source and still turn into 404s when that source goes down. That that file might still exist on another server is largely meaningless when you have no easy way to discover it and no way to tell if it is even the right file.

The problem we have today is not storage, but locating the data.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Why would people mirror some body else's stuff?

Maybe youd personally do a small number of things if you found it interesting, but i dont see that being very side scale.