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

Five hundred years is a long time, but I think it's reasonable to try to design a site that could last, for example, 25 years, because you can already write something which COULD HAVE worked for the PREVIOUS 25 years by testing with older browsers.

You'll want to restrict yourself to a subset of HTML which is supported by all of them, perhaps with some progressive enhancement.

Huh? Pounding your fists on the table is not, you know, an argument. That not everything is deleted after 50 years is not proof that something can last permanently.

> In any case, toward the more general claim that this post is making, which I will summarize as "Authoritarian societies

That's a complete misunderstanding of the post, which contrasts traditional societies with liberal societies, by changing the subject to authoritarian societies. As if this was the only choice.

Authoritarian societies are not the opposite of liberal societies. In fact authoritarian societies -- e.g. communist and nazi societies or other societies in which individuals are micromanaged -- only came into existence in the 20th Century when the technology for mass micromanagement became possible. And whatever words you use to descibe authoritarian societies, "preserving tradition" is not one of them. These are big book burning, history-rewriting societies because they try to address the issue of social reproduction by the fist of centralized top-down control that monitors and micro-manages every aspect of life. Human beings are not compatible with that type of control, which is why authoritarian societies don't last very long -- the Russian czars lasted a thousand years whereas communism lasted only 70. And people were much more free under the czars than under communism, because the czars never tried to control every aspect of social life, and never needed to setup networks of gulags, or a vast secret police force, or party functionaries throwing people in prison for skipping work without a doctor's note.

There is the old saying "the right talks about authority, the left talks about control". For a society to be able to preserve knowledge, it must develop long lasting institutions and a culture that reveres the past and seeks to preserve it. Therefore while you need a cultural respect for authority, you cannot actually have a centralized system of social control. So you need basics like "honor your father and your mother" to be taught in churches and other civil institutions, but you cannot have a world in which political meetings decide which author is going to be erased from history today or whether so-and-so is allowed to attend university because their parents were class enemies.

Because you don't have the hardware lying around right now. It's still quite possible to read all popular formats today and most of the ones you mentioned can even connect to the same SATA bus available on basically all normal mainboards. And those are mediums which are built for ~10 years (you'll find bit rot by then, which is what is actually preventing you from reading the data). Tapes, for example, are meant for long-term storage, are still in use and can be readily read.

To add to this, books have the same problem. Have a look at the declaration of independence: The font and language is already quite different from what we use today, and that's only from ~250 years ago. Plus the paper would probably not hold up to normal handling anymore.