There’s a simple alternative to the current web • Hacker News Board

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#51

Post by MetaCosm » Sat, Aug 23, 2014, 7:44 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #6

Clearly I'm a biased observer, but I really think people should take steps to archive stuff that is important to them. Of course it's terrible when large sites go offline and take vast swaths of the Internet with them, and we should continue to shame the ones that do it. At the same time, if something is really important to you, you shouldn't store it in the form of links to random third-party servers. One problem we…

> Clearly I'm a biased observer, but I really think people should take steps to archive stuff that is important to them.

I recently converted all my bookmarks to saved copies of the pages in Evernote. This means I have full text search over everything I "bookmark" -- still have the links -- and never lose it regardless of what happens.

In this process, I was shocked at the number of 404s I encountered from relatively recent (last 18 months) bookmarks.

Evernote is a bit of a wreck, but so far the combination of decent copy of page, browser plugins, tags, search, accessibility (phone clients, web client, some native clients) have made it my best option.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#52

Post by can09 » Sat, Aug 23, 2014, 7:45 PM UTC

spindritf wrote: post #27

It’s interesting that Andreessen can’t see the solution, but perhaps expected. What a weird dig. It's neither expected, nor established that he can't see a solution. I'm not as smart as Andreessen and I could come up with half a dozen solutions. Author's favourite is fine but far, far from obvious. How viable is it to run your own federated wiki anyway? Are there packages for popular systems? Are there plugins for ma…

What he seems to be getting at is a much larger, more revolutionary approach to not just "the web", but "the internet" as we know it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#53

Post by twoodfin » Sat, Aug 23, 2014, 7:52 PM UTC

I'd love it if browsers natively supported URI's derived from cryptographic hashes of content by looking them up in a distributed store a la BitTorrent. Imagine if Chrome supported such a thing, for example. Perfectly reliable cache-ability (or archive-ability), P2P hosting, ... All the good stuff for any web content that its creator wants to so expose, albeit at the price of immutability.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#54

Post by oridecon » Sat, Aug 23, 2014, 7:55 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #6

Clearly I'm a biased observer, but I really think people should take steps to archive stuff that is important to them. Of course it's terrible when large sites go offline and take vast swaths of the Internet with them, and we should continue to shame the ones that do it. At the same time, if something is really important to you, you shouldn't store it in the form of links to random third-party servers. One problem we…

Luckly if Stack Overflow goes down the one billion shady scrapper bots will have (at least) the most viewed questions.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#55

Post by al2o3cr » Sat, Aug 23, 2014, 8:08 PM UTC

mgunes wrote: post #18

dilap wrote: post #3

"The Tyranny of Print" has a nice ring to it, but mediums that give the creator more control over appearance+behavior are going to lend themselves to crafting more compelling experiences. Sure, not disappearing in 10 years (or whenever the original server goes poof) would also be nice, but it's of little benefit if no one ever sees the thing in the first place. And disappearing is the default, natural state of things…

> And disappearing is the default, natural state of things. Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy. The same is not the case for information disseminated in a controlled manner from privately owned servers. > If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they'…

"Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy."

Only the ones that have survived. For every book or tablet we have, there are certainly tens of THOUSANDS of which every copy ever published has been lost - most of those are ephemera that wouldn't mean much to us anyways, but the lost also include things that would be nice: the majority of Livy, any of the original source material for the Gospels, etc.

Even considerably more modern material has been vanishing at a significant rate; for instance, most of the output of the silent film era has already been lost.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#56

Post by mark_l_watson » Sat, Aug 23, 2014, 8:14 PM UTC

I like the idea of the federated wiki, but search engines rank copies of pages poorly, so it is not clear how visible copies would be after the original content disappears.

I used Evernote for years, but recently canceled the service because I spent too much time curating compared to reading old material.

One option that I am considering is archiving really good web content as web archive files and saving them locally in folders indicating the year of capture. Local file search would quickly find old stuff and if I stored the yearly web archive folders in Dropbox, I would have them available on different systems.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#57

Post by asaddhamani » Sat, Aug 23, 2014, 8:24 PM UTC

purplerails wrote: post #12

I've been thinking about this for a while now. Please check out my web app to solve this problem: https://www.purplerails.com/ The main idea is to use a browser extension to automatically save pages that you read to the cloud (including the images, stylesheets etc) in the background. Saved pages are searchable and sharable.

I tried giving purplerails a shot. I use LastPass for password management, and I am not going to type in a 25/30 character password every single time I want to log into an application. I think you're going way too hard on that part. This is the first time I've had this happen to me when using a web app, and it immediately made me close the page.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#58

Post by bajsejohannes » Sat, Aug 23, 2014, 8:26 PM UTC

I think the federated wiki is a neat idea, but in it's current incarnation, I find it to be exceedingly unlikely that a page I'm looking at there will stay around 10 years.

Even if I'm making a copy of every page I see, I'm not sure I'll still run a federated wiki on my server in 10 years.

I don't think this is a real solution to the problem posed by Bret Victor.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#59

Post by jaimebuelta » Sat, Aug 23, 2014, 9:10 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #6

Clearly I'm a biased observer, but I really think people should take steps to archive stuff that is important to them. Of course it's terrible when large sites go offline and take vast swaths of the Internet with them, and we should continue to shame the ones that do it. At the same time, if something is really important to you, you shouldn't store it in the form of links to random third-party servers. One problem we…

This is the only real solution (even if it's through an intermediate agent, which may have the same problem. Remember Google Reader). Of course, then the problem to keep that info in a good way (indexable, accessible, backed up, etc...) is another interesting problem. I'm afraid that most of the people are simply not aware of all of this (both on the content supplier or the content consumer)

This is also somehow of a problem on printed books. There are tons of books that are out of print and cannot be easily found.

Re: There’s a simple alternative to the current web

#60

Post by BerislavLopac » Sat, Aug 23, 2014, 9:13 PM UTC

dilap wrote: post #3

"The Tyranny of Print" has a nice ring to it, but mediums that give the creator more control over appearance+behavior are going to lend themselves to crafting more compelling experiences. Sure, not disappearing in 10 years (or whenever the original server goes poof) would also be nice, but it's of little benefit if no one ever sees the thing in the first place. And disappearing is the default, natural state of things…

> If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing live music is broken and we should fix it".

Actually, that's exactly what the inventors of (various) recording machines did. Something might have disappeared in one form, only to return in another. Just ask the Project Gutenberg people.