Ask HN: Where would you publish content that should outlive you?

I think the relevant question is "What content would you publish that would be important enough to be retrieved after it outlives you?"

If you publish any content it ends up on several storage devices somewhere along the way, hosting server hdd, ram in routers, switches, etc. We know we can retrieve erased data from hdd's today even if it's been overwritten once or twice. The chances are in the future we'll get even better at that and we'll be able to retrieve an arbitrary cycles of overwritten data.

So the question won't be will that data exist in the future as much as will it be worth anyone's time to look it up, even with a near zero look up time.

I think that's a much harder thing to try to accomplish today so that people care about what you had to say in a few generations.

For example we could look up the DNA sequence of anyone who was ever been buried in a grave that is still around today, how many of their grand grand kids actually do? And what more accurate and interesting fact about a random person is there to know than that?

So unless you invent something notable or make a meaningful contribution, I doubt anyone would care enough to see what you had to say.

Storage is not your problem, content is.

Your own website, then archive it.

Write everything in a book, publish it. Make it & yourself famous.

My experience doing this, granted two generations removed and all information existing before the digital era, was predicated on access to local, university, and church libraries/librarians.

If you can get a hard document into the preserved record, at a university, library, church, newspaper, etc you can have some assurance that humans for the next century will do their best to try and preserve it.

For example, the original copy of my grandfather's graduate thesis which is partially handwritten (the rest by typewriter - what isn't typed was done before typesetting was available to the average midwestern grad student in the 40s) is in a university library, and was digitally cataloged about 15 years ago. I have a bound copy that I got by contacting the librarians there and plan to give as a holiday gift to all of his children (my dad, his siblings).

Similarly, my grandmother kept detailed records of her local music clubs' meetings, including annotated program notes and scores. We found these by combing through six decades of scores that she'd kept in boxes in her basement (thank god there was never a flood or fire).

I told my brother and sister that they should keep hard copies of their writings around, and duplicates in safe deposit boxes or similar document storage for their kids/grandkids if they exist.

At the end of the day you need to trust institutions that will preserve information longer than a generation or two, which are libraries and banks.

One area that may not be obviously interesting is that your local community probably has a library and probably does not have much detailed published information on its history. And you probably have a local history society made up of volunteers. These organizations will last longer than you or I and you can trust if you publish something they care about (a local history, catalog of people, yourself, your neighbors, etc) those documents will long outlast you.

We think of paper as being cheap and easily destroyed, but paper documents often survive centuries. As long as there are people to keep it safe it will be around.

The ability to read digital data in the future is a very good point.

I recently wanted to retrieve my PhD (2000). It was on a disquette, I found the correct reader and had high hopes to connecting it to a contemporary PC.

The thing is that I could not find the disquette anymore, despite being sure it is "there"

Physical outputs like photo albums and notebooks or documents. Then provide a digital copy as well, physically. Keep the formats as simple as possible, plain text, and video/photo formats that are universal, also document what the formats are for each category of content.

I don't think there's any online digital method that can be guaranteed. Also, this may be hard to accept, unless you led an extraordinary life (I'm talking about your name being known by like 1000 actual humans for something specific, social media doesn't count), a generation or two later the media is most likely to be lost. Fires, storms, random thumb drives getting thrown out, etc. Think of how often you look back at content about your grandparents, for me its like once a year I'll look at the compiled genealogy a family member put together.