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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?

#121

Post by pjerem »

orangepurple wrote: post #85
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS phone lines” —someone in 1985, probably

The thing is there can't be more than one internet, ever. The moment someone invents a new internet, someone will create a gateway to the old internet, and the internet will live on.

The internet can be highly regulated or the new one can be highly centralized and controlled.

The old internet could disappear as long as the economical incentives are enough to transition to a new centralized form of internet.

We are far from it, thanks, but don’t neglect that Facebook made a ton of websites become useless (to their owner at least) and disappear. Also, networks operators have made low cost plans limited to some of the internet. This is far from enough to kill the internet but a more restricted network is totally amongst the possibilities. And I’m not even talking about state control like in China.

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

#122

Post by h2odragon »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #75
orangepurple wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be 500 year old seeded torrents

“There will exist 500 year old actively serviced BBS phone lines” —someone in 1985, probably

There's content from those BBS systems still available; so dunno if thats the argument (I think) you think it is.

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

#123

Post by axiosgunnar »

asciimov wrote: post #95

Print it in a book, on good archival quality ink and paper. Make a couple of copies stored in various locations in case of natural disaster. Look the English language is a lot different today than it was in 1621 and with the pace that technology changes I strongly doubt that anything web related will be able to run. (Assuming that civilization will still be standing, they still have a way to power technology) So, tha…

Why 1621?

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

#124

Post by nkrisc »

trinovantes wrote: post #81
tekknik wrote: post #16

How do you know what the internet will look like in 500 years? Sites from 20 years ago are broken, you can expect that unless you’re using plain text and html that standards will change in 500 years and people will not be able to access your site. Then there’s issues with domains. You’d have to setup a trust and again assume we will still be using domains in 500 years. If you use something like S3 then you’ll have to…

There's also the fact that human language will also change over the course of 500 years 500 year old English is nothing like English today

It’s still intelligible, though. One thousand years is about the accepted timeframe for a language to be no longer mutually intelligible for speakers at either end of that period.

Of course, it’s entirely possible the rate of change within a language is not static over millennia.

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

#125

Post by remus »

paulpauper wrote: post #106
londons_explore wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"small" things like this I assume end up really expensive in wills. Making a page of text available to the public for 500 years might involve 25 people (each person being responsible for 20 years), and each of them has to be paid enough to care. To ensure each is paid enough, there needs to be a fund to pay them, and that itself needs to be managed by someone, who will also want paying for their troubles. Also consid…

put the rest in an index fund , which helps pay future salary. there are probably ways to do it

I think it's harder than you might think. The New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1792 (229 years ago), there's a lot of things that can wrong over the course of 500 years to mean funding for your project would disappear. Wars, civil unrest, large environmental events etc. are all pretty much guaranteed over a 500 year time span.

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

#126

Post by rossdavidh »

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.

Sorry, that was the point I was trying to make, perhaps I should have made it more explicitly.

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

#127

Post by jonas21 »

kryptiskt wrote: post #72

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.

> creating some sort of charitable foundation with the mission of doing this

Is this not already the mission of the Internet Archive? Except instead of just your page, they preserve all pages that they crawl.

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

#128

Post by asciimov »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #123
asciimov wrote: post #95

Print it in a book, on good archival quality ink and paper. Make a couple of copies stored in various locations in case of natural disaster. Look the English language is a lot different today than it was in 1621 and with the pace that technology changes I strongly doubt that anything web related will be able to run. (Assuming that civilization will still be standing, they still have a way to power technology) So, tha…

Why 1621?

Typo, should have been 1521. English has changed a bit since 1621 too. Both dates are in the during the great vowel shift.

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

#129

Post by _shantaram »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #104

The only practical enough way I can think of is: (1) create static documents in the simplest and most standard lossless (as far as possible) format. (2) store them on a durable enough, yet simple enough medium. Today that would probably be something simple like an USB stick. (3) transfer to new medium periodically, and take the opportunity to convert obsolete media files to new formats, if needed (you could keep the…

wrt (2), I remember reading (watching? maybe it was a YouTube video), that the answer to long-term storage is optical media. There was even a brand of discs that advertised itself as being a 300-year data storage medium.

The engineer in me wants to make some sort of metal etched disk medium to store data on and bury it somewhere with a marker on top. Preferably with instructions on how to retrieve the data.

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