Was thinking about this when dwelling over archive.is's habit of blocking Cloudflare DNS users due to Cloudflare not sharing specific types of identifying info on user traffic. I like archive.is but that practice smells so funny it makes me believe the entire site will go dark or paywalled/private in time.
In contrast to the greasy nature of archive.is the owner of archive.org is a data nerd in the purest form. This guy archives, he makes other people want to archive. Archive.org has been such a smashing success that its now too large for it's own good.
We need more alternatives, in the same vein and spirit as archive.org. Please keep all venture capitalist/disruption/innovation agitators away from making the issue over complex or stilted towards a commercialized end game. Just archive.
Would a distributed version work? I mean I can't dedicate much bandwidth or enough storage for the whole archive but I could dedicate a few terabyte. Is there anyone working on such a thing?
Its really hard for me to define when we're over-complicating the premise that made Archive.org flourish, but I would love to distribute the data to alleviate the dangers of centralization in general.
I believe something like ipfs, a strong search engine, coupled with the activism that brought traffic to archive.org initially would be wonderful:
Always be cautious of a technological solution to an organizational problem.
A distributed file system would build robustness into the system and keep the data from getting deleted, but only at appropriate scale. Even assuming enough scale, how do you ensure ongoing operation of the data collection aspects of archive.org, or the development of the distribution tools like the wayback machine. I’ve also seen enough distributed files systems come and go to have concerns about data rot.
As important as a distributed technological solution is setting up legal entities and ownership structures to ensure the archiving activities continue even if one of the entities does something risky.
Was thinking about this when dwelling over archive.is's habit of blocking Cloudflare DNS users due to Cloudflare not sharing specific types of identifying info on user traffic. I like archive.is but that practice smells so funny it makes me believe the entire site will go dark or paywalled/private in time.
In contrast to the greasy nature of archive.is the owner of archive.org is a data nerd in the purest form. This guy archives, he makes other people want to archive. Archive.org has been such a smashing success that its now too large for it's own good.
We need more alternatives, in the same vein and spirit as archive.org. Please keep all venture capitalist/disruption/innovation agitators away from making the issue over complex or stilted towards a commercialized end game. Just archive.