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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?

#491
Turn the website into historical curiosity.

For example:

Encode the text in QR codes. Use laser to etch the QR codes into thin and light metal plates. Wait until access to space becomes cheaper, then pay $ so that someone places those plates on the surface of the Moon.

Every 30, 50, 100 years some space tourist discovers those plates, reads them and posts them into internet as a curiosity. Their content is probably in Wikipedia, Wikimedia and web archives too.

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

#492

Print it out on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink. Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof container. Entrust it to one of your children, tell them to keep it in a safe-deposit box and take it out once a year to share with their children, and to pass it on to their children with the same instructions. If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500 years is that it will be a…

> “What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant…

Posting spoilers without a warning is extremely rude.

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

#494
I don't know the answer but I'll share a short real story.

We made (me and others) the ENS+IPFS website almonit.eth in 2019. You can access it with a web3 browser or a gateway (almonit.eth.limo).

For a long while I was pinning it in IPFS with my server, but in March this year the project stopped so I killed my daemon.

However(!) -- since the website is so popular, it actually still now, 7 months later, though there is no one pinning it really. It just lives on the fumes of its popularity.

I honestly wonder how long it will continue.

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

#497

As we saw with Inspiration 4, SpaceX is willing to take commissions, thus: This might not be the cheapest way, however, if you can engineer a satellite to last 500 years [1], you could then have SpaceX put it up in orbit for over 500 years[2]. Have this satellite broadcast your website via radio [3]. Then setup a trust with a consortium of lawyers to maintain a ground station network that hosts the website on earth's…

Re: [1] assuming it's possible, you'd still want to probably have 2 or 3 satellites for redundancy...

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

#499
I can appreciate this desire. Printing my website is basically out of the question at this point. I rely upon people thinking it worthwhile to keep a copy, and I make it fairly easy for people to do so. I distribute on a number of networks, I offer a number of snapshot archives (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/*/philosopher.life), and I make it easy to download a complete copy of the entire site (https://philosopher.life/#Readme), as it's just a single html file. I do ask family and friends to see it as a book they will keep in their libraries, and I keep it very small, almost pure text (I don't want it to be any further a burden than it already is). Some store it on a thumbdrive or even keep it as an e-mail attachment. And, that it is nearly pure text is something that I think is exceptionally useful for this problem, as even if there aren't browsers that will be able to render it (that would be sad), there may be tools that can at least read the source (and, in a way, the site is meant to be somewhat readable from source, though it requires some motivation). I also enjoy the knowledge that there are random copies out there sitting on hard drives. I think it's gonna take some luck too.

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

#500

The world wide web is only 28 years old. We've had computers for 76 years at this point. We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anythi…

Maybe also start a traditoin in your family to have many children and to memorise the website up to a single character, like a sacred text.

Some texts survived long time in oral form, I heard.

Forming the sources as a verse could help here.

Mostly oriented to texts, altough images can be memorized in their hex encoding, for example.

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