31–40 of 101 posts
I'd suggest you do buy a domain, but set up a legal/financial framework so that a long-standing law firm will keep up the payments for N decades (or for as long as the firm & its successors exist).
- Make your static data small.
- Pick a version scheme and use it.
- Gather your static data into a release, including an indicator of the version, and sign it.
- Also gather your static data into a form easily transmittable by others. If your static data will fit into a few pages of PDFs, it can be read by just about anything with a CPU that real people touch, and can also be printable. There are many tools that create PDFs that aren't Adobe.
- HTML archives, such as those that SingleFile make, are better than PDFs but less accessible (e.g. not viewable on phones, require extension to be installed).
- License the content in a way that encourages sharing.
- Make sure the content itself encourages sharing. Good, unique artwork tends to do this, in addition to the data itself being interesting or important. Comics from the 1940s made it to the Internet age and they'll probably make the post-Internet age too.
- Discord, Telegram, and Github would be an example of three places that would understand the concept of "here's a PDF of a site, here for archival purposes, feel free to share this to anyone or print it."
This is actually pretty hard to do. We all have heard of internet rot/dead internet theory. One shout might be to link to internet archive instead of the resource directly. Though we can't be sure internet archive will keep the current system working as is (e.g. search params may change etc) The only solid solution I have is to set up a foundation and pour money in so that they will be responsible for upkeep. But tha…
The foundation has a remit to also do some related "good works". The idea is that the pot of money (and the interest it throws off) acts as an incentive to keep the foundation going. Eventually the cost of hosting "legacy" data should drop close to zero. You could run it as an overlay on two clouds initially to avoid capital outlay.
I think you would want librarians / archivists on the board. It wouldn't require much in the way of software, making something that could last in the long term is more of a governance problem than a technical one.
Put it on Blogger from Google. Has been around since 1999. There are some huge blogs/websites hosted on Blogger. They make money with Adsense, and it turn Google does to. Google has killed a lot of products but in my opinion they will keep this. There are just so many blogs, little and small, some who have posts dating from '99 even, still online.
Google in 2024 feels like IBM in 1974. The brand will surely exist fifty years from now, but possibly much diminished. I wouldn’t count on any specific product surviving the “legacification” of Google.
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.
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.
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 conte…
Ultimately you have to give a human direct responsibility for it; or in your case, a series of humans. I'd suggest you do buy a domain, but set up a legal/financial framework so that a long-standing law firm will keep up the payments for N decades (or for as long as the firm & its successors exist).
"Free" data storage for as long as the internet exists.
Make the barcode to your transaction with the data, anyone with a brain and time can figure it out from there.
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 conte…