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Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

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Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#71

Post by literallyaduck »

1. Put it on github static pages and hope for the best.

2. Create a bot that searches the internet for free hosting, and automate account creation and mirror the content.

3. Print 100 copies on different manufacturers archive quality paper, use a vacuum pump and seal the books separately. Shield them from light. Put money in trust for a trustee to find something like fiver to rebuild the site every 20 years with one of your archive backups. Include multi language dictionaries in your archive storage for the eventually that your language is dead.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#72

Post by kryptiskt »

Really boring answer: Make provisions for it in your will, which likely will mean creating some sort of charitable foundation with the mission of doing this. If the personal page is useful and/or hosts some creative work keeping that alive can be the entire goal of it, otherwise the foundation might have to do some actual charity and the preservation of the page would be a quirk in the statutes.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#73

Post by philipswood »

junon wrote: post #15
rossdavidh wrote: post #5

Look at what has lasted 500 years, and use those media. Websites are not among them. 1) stone 2) books if printed on the right kind of paper 3) metal if it's not something subject to rust Even if it is possible to make a website that lasts 500 years, I expect we haven't figured out how yet. I'm sure it took people a while to figure out how to make long-lasting tombstones; early North American ones were often made out…

This isn't a fair premise. Websites have not existed for 500 years and were not possible until roughly around the time of their inception.

True, but what percentage of electronic records from the 70s are still readable?

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#74

Post by eldavido »

I've thought about this. Keep it completely static, no back-end server required, minimal front-end javascript, mostly plain HTML.

The key, as many others have said, is to make it easy to copy/archive (on computers, archive.org, etc). A simple set of linked pages (with graphics in widely-used formats, eg JPEG/PNG) is your best bet.

What the stone tablets crowd here misses is that a lot of cultural production today that's very important--major artworks, political speeches, movies, court records--is electronic. This means that by necessity, unless you think that entire corpus will get discarded, future societies are going to develop archival systems capable of indexing and decoding all this information.

Also - storage capacity has grown a lot, and that's a trend I'm betting will continue. Today, entire libraries' worth of books and magazines can be mass-duplicated and carried around on disk drives or USB sticks. What does this trend look like in 500 years?

I also think using open systems and formats has a better chance of survival than proprietary ones, if only because there are more reference implementations for how to convert bits into something people can understand/experience. There's a lot of important stuff written in .doc (MS Word) but my money's on HTML or ASCII, or even PDF if you want long-term survival.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#75

Post by MontyCarloHall »

orangepurple wrote: post #50
georgyo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A torrent with no seeders does not really exist.

There will be 500 year old seeded torrents

“There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS phone lines”

—someone in 1985, probably

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#76

Post by d4mi3n »

I've toyed with the idea of putting money into a trust and having the executors of the trust use the money to maintain stuff like this.

It's more of an institutional solution than a technical one, but I'm personally more comfortable with an institution lasting 500 years than an unmaintained piece of hardware or software.

It's the same strategy used by museums--they take a grant from somewhere (from government, public, or private entities) and use that money to retain expertise and resources required to preserve stuff like the Mona Lisa or a dinosaur skeletons for future generations.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#77

Post by LinuxBender »

xixixao wrote: post #65
LinuxBender wrote: post #11

That's a really tricky thought exercise. Legal trusts in most countries have time limits. Businesses come and go all the time. I think you are describing the same dilemma that companies offering freezing/preservation of your body or head upon death/near-death are dealing with. That is probably the business model I would study to find out what countries have the legal structure to support their requirements and thus y…

I was gonna suggest, instead of relying on your descendants/lawyers, “simply” avoid physical aging and death yourself, then you can continue to maintain the website. Good starter resource: https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Aging-forthcoming-extension...

I've been following the various teams working on halting or reversing aging. They are making great progress but sadly are not producing anything that can be commercially acquired yet. There are human trials on some of the methods being used on specific organs but nothing being tested on the entire body yet as far as I know. If you know of intravenous clinical trials resetting the epigenetic methylation body-wide, I would like to know. I believe they are still trying to find the balance that does not lead to tumors.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#78

Post by quaintdev »

jimmytucson wrote: post #69

There are books that have been around for 500+ years. They’re probably more durable than websites at this point.

whether the book or ideas will be preserved depends on their content.

For example, Marcus Aurelius thought survived for 2000 years. Your or mine website/blog/book I am not sure if it will.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

#79

Post by orangepurple »

philipswood wrote: post #68
orangepurple wrote: post #31

20x overspec'd solar panel. No battery. Broadcast a wifi hotspot at minimum radio power. Keep the components cold just above freezing and never allow them to freeze. You can accomplish this by using geothermal engineering to your benefit and burying the device with an appropriate heat exchanger so the planet can regulate the server temperature. Add in high availability and failover by using multiple buried devices co…

Aren't solar panel lifetimes in the decade range?

I don't know if the decay is linear or exponential with a long tail, but I assume solar panels don't fail outright unless they experience a short circuit or extreme temperature swings. Instead their output progressively declines. I bet a very large solar panel in the shade will last a very long time.
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