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Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever

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21–30 of 101 posts

Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever

#21

Anywhere + get the Internet Archive to index it? IPFS could be a contender, though I don't know where it stands now, but it's the ambition, at least.

The internet archive seems to continually be getting into legally precarious situations. I wouldn’t bet on it staying around for too long.

Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever

#22
Putting it on Arweave is the best I can think of. And then link to the content on arweave.net:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:arweave.net+book

As Arweave is designed for this exact use case. Even if arweave.net disappears, one can still find the content one the Arweave blockchain via the hash. The chain is built in a way that it creates a very high incentive for people around the world to keep hosting the content.

Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever

#23

Anywhere + get the Internet Archive to index it? IPFS could be a contender, though I don't know where it stands now, but it's the ambition, at least.

IPFS doesn't work like that. It's not an immutable archive. A node on the network has to actively host (or "pin") the content for it to be available on the network. Yes the content can be cached by other nodes, but see the definition of a cache for why you can't rely on that in the long term.

Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever

#26
I'll offer a weird but (I hope) valid alternative to the other great suggestions here:

print the code of the static webpage on a piece of paper. Even better, archival paper [0], so it will really last a long time.

In the future, anyone would be able to point a... smartphone, or a camera, to the paper, and instantly retrieve the webpage. An AI will ask them if they want to render the page using one of these very, very old things called browsers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper

Re: Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever

#29
100 years is too long. Maybe not because the company or institution where you will host it directly or indirectly will vanish (the Lindy effect matters choosing one), but because we, as internet and its users, moved on. The changes are accelerating, in the last very few years AIs are being used as search engines and providing content, new generations doesn't read so much (as they consume things like Instagram or TikTok), and that is a relatively recent development.

You may still find user pages on universities that goes back to the early 90's, before that simply there was no web, and that was just 30 years back, 10 years earlier was the start of TCP/IP, mail and DNS protocols. But 20 years later from now things may be very different to what we know so far.

Maybe it would be for the better to ride the waves, and instead of doing things like we did till a few years back, rely on AIs or other systems that will hold that knowledge somewhat and that can be interacted with. And hope that where you put the today's style static web page with your book addendum gets indexed by them and used when the consumer of the content you created request it somehow.

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