this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
266 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37735 readers
45 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
remington
alyaza
TheRtRevKaiser
gyrfalcon
rs5th
coldredlight
Los
SemioticStandard
TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social
266
The Internet Is Failing The Website Preservation Test (archive.ph)
submitted 1 year ago by Gork to c/technology
83 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] strainedl0ve 40 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.

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 1 year ago

I'd argue that it can help or hurt to decentralize, depending on how it's handled. If most sites are caching/backing up data that's found elsewhere, that's both good for resilience and for preservation, but if the data in question is centralized by its home server, then instead of backing up one site we're stuck backing up a thousand, not to mention the potential issues with discovery