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

I've thought about a project like this. Although, in my fantasies it was a way to store wealth and provide incentives for revitalization while I am in cryogenic stasis waiting to be thawed out and revived.

Basically, I would write a few modules - Content, secrets, funder, tester, advertiser, executor, and get them running in some cloud deployment.

Content is whatever website you want to host. That part wasn't in my fantasies. Secrets module implements an API to share and store secret information provided the caller has the right keys. Funder is responsible for interfacing with financial accounts and making prudent, low risk, financial decisions. In our time, this would be like using a Robinhood/Webull/whatever account to buy blue chip companies with a long history of steady share prices and dividends. The tester module confirms that all other modules faithfully reproduce their intended purpose and providing functional models with contact information for the executor. The executor is responsible for starting the other modules and providing them with the credentials they need to access the secrets module and get the other credentials they will need to function. Finally, the advertiser module is responsible for hiring freelancers to build copies of the other modules.

The system should aim to reproduce itself every five years or so and to kill itself off, by transferring funds to surviving children, when it starts experiencing operational problems, it begins to amass too much wealth, or it's been around for too long.

When new systems, standards, financial patterns, whatever arise, the future developers of the day will implement the new modules to interact with those new systems. If freelance developers get replaced by automated AI systems, then hire those instead, etc. Ideally, nothing would change too radically in between generations.

The system should aim to have a growing number of descendants, all investing their funds in whatever the most stable opportunities of the day are. The reason to try to have a growing number of descendants is that some will die by bad or fraudulent reproduction. Others might lose all of their money due to unlucky investment outcomes. Still others might get disabled or shut down. However, so long as the system maintains a positive expected survival rate, and it reproduces, I think the population of systems will increase.

When society collapses, software of any kind will probably be among the least of our concerns.

Ramses is still better known than Shelley, some 5k years later. Ozymandias won.

Claim the webpage was revealed to you in a vision from God, and tell folks they’ll go to heaven if they study it. Seemed to work for Mohammed, Moses, Joseph Smith, and many others.

Cut the data into the surface of a chunk of highly reflective and stable metal. Lob that into a high orbit. It will blink out your data from on high with nothing more than the incident light of the sun to anyone with a basic telescope, or even their naked eyes if it's big enough.

Obviously the details would be rather complicated. How is the data encoded? Morse code? Maybe ok for 500 years assuming the language it decodes to stays around. You could treat it like the messages we send to deep space and make it only pictograms. But that might take some effort if you are trying to bemoan the complexity of k8s for generations to come. That brings up the question of what are you trying to say? Do you already have something you think is worth saying across deep time? A person could spend their life solving that problem before they even get to the engineering challenges...