this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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Technology

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[–] Roundcat@kbin.cafe 32 points 1 year ago (6 children)

What if the internet archives, instead of a single site, was a bunch of federated instances sharing content with each other like fediverse?

I am of course very ignorant to how internet archives actually works, and not very tech savy, but would something like I'm suggesting be theoretically possible?

[–] beejjorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes, for storage, if we coordinated enough. Such technologies already exist. But IA also does tons of archival work that isn't so easily distributed. And their lending system isn't easily legally federated.

[–] thefartographer@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Ok, but what if we wanted to each take pieces of that tree of knowledge and help others learn from it. Could we possibly hold onto that information and plant our own little trees with seeds? And the more people who had seeds, the faster the tree would ~~download~~ grow.

^Arrrgh matey^

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Their lending system is not part of their core functionality and IMO should be a separate thing.

[–] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago

Yeah that was my first thought too. That seems like a way better idea than just entrusting it to the Library of Congress as the article suggests. For one thing, the internet archive isn't just American stuff. For another, there's no way the government won't just bend over backwards as soon as a big corporation asks it to. Thirdly, it seems like a much better idea to keep it decentralized and to keep the corporations playing whack-a-mole with it than to just keep giving them one big, static target to aim at.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

you kinda described ipfs

[–] octiman@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 1 year ago

It's an interesting idea. It would take a lot of infrastructure though.

[–] liv@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Even if we just decentralised/federated the Wayback Machine, that would really be great.

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's already working like that, at least on the indexer side. You can create an account and use their app or browser extensions and start snapshotting websites you visit and submit them to the wayback machine. Storage is still centralized in The Internet Archive datacenter though.