Let's be brutally honest here: The internet archive is great on the whole. But not perfect. For example, their "emergency library" thing cost then some goodwill and incurred legal risk that jeopardized the whole project. Every host is failible. Decentralization is key. - ThreadSky

questauthority.bsky.social • 92 days ago

Let's be brutally honest here:
The internet archive is great on the whole. But not perfect. For example, their "emergency library" thing cost then some goodwill and incurred legal risk that jeopardized the whole project.

Every host is failible. Decentralization is key.

Reposted from Mike Dickison

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

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simon.batistoni.net•92 days ago

The post-Biden archive is 266TB, which would cost about $12,000 in hardware to host at home. But you can still buy a less-crazy NAS and grab your own copies of stuff that you personally think is important from the archive—in my experience, the internet archive folks actively *want* that to happen!

boozybadger.bsky.social•91 days ago

The Internet Archive of Alexandria is a frightening idea

shamusthefox.bsky.social•91 days ago

"This Doug Winger porn is culturally significant and must be preserved!"

josh2028.bsky.social•91 days ago

Someone build a p2p service for this

shillelagh.bsky.social•91 days ago

And in this case, I think it needs to be decentralized- Musk is gonna try and take it (and Wikipedia) down.

blahpers.bsky.social•91 days ago

Which is fine—we can write crawlers that mirror the entire archive.

blahpers.bsky.social•91 days ago

(Granted, at 500 TB at IA's ridiculously slow transfer rate, those crawlers are gonna take a while)

wbfmorningstar.bsky.social•91 days ago

I've been mentally noting where all the paper work has gone and revisiting all the emergency and weather resources I used for World disaster reporting.

en effet, climate change is real and Trump got a bad facelift.

fifthtreewarden.bsky.social•91 days ago

Ironically a legitimate use for blockchain. Decentralized and at least somewhat guarded against dubious changes by bad actors.

blahpers.bsky.social•91 days ago

As usual, blockchain doesn't add anything useful to this solution that isn't better covered by either much simpler technologies or simple social hygiene

fifthtreewarden.bsky.social•91 days ago

I would agree with you for 99% of problems but given our nation's current social hygiene ehhh. But something like the archive that doesn't update very often but could be distributed over multiple machines with a public ledger of changes so you know exactly who messed with what? I think it would work

blahpers.bsky.social•91 days ago

A certain amount of social hygiene is still required for anyone to care about a blockchain dispute. There are a number of much lower tech solutions that are no worse on that front.

I'm not gonna start a fight over it though! The kind of chain you're talking about would be harmless.

fifthtreewarden.bsky.social•91 days ago

That's fair. Even blockchain systems are susceptible to takeover! There are definitely lower tech ways to handle this as well, just by copying and distributing it.

And yeah I am very much against dumb stuff like bitcoin mining that is actually harmful to the environment.

silverdragon400.bsky.social•91 days ago

📌

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