this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Technology

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The Internet Is Failing The Website Preservation Test (archive.ph)
submitted 1 year ago by Gork@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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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[–] strainedl0ve@beehaw.org 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is a very good point and one that is not discussed enough. Archive.org is doing amazing work but there is absolutely not enough of that and they have very limited resources.

The whole internet is extremely ephemeral, more than people realize, and it's concerning in my opinion. Funny enough, I actually think that federation/decentralization might be the solution. A distributed system to back-up the internet that anyone can contribute storage and bandwidth to might be the only sustainable solution. I wonder.if anyone has thought about it already.

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