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Isn’t the distributed nature of web making this super hard? Everyone can buy a new domain, everyone can structure one’s website differently, everyone can stop p

Isn’t the distributed nature of web making this super hard? Everyone can buy a new domain, everyone can structure one’s website differently, everyone can stop publishing content in any date. Innovative ideas about distribution and structure pop out frequently and change how data is served. It’s different from usual publication where publishers are needed to publish content, structure has not changed since the B.C. era when books were invented, and data is physical. We started archiving publications long after they were invented; the web was made only 20 years ago. I’ll take a long time to find a way to reliably save data that is served in a distributed sense, and people will have to study web with ones that survived, just like how we study papyrus or the Rosetta’s stone.

0815test 8y ago
> It’ll take a long time to find a way to reliably save data that is served in a distributed sense That's actually easy - it's literally what blockchains are for. The whole issue is how to manage the tradeoff between reliably archiving everything (and expecting participants in the network to do the same, so that the system doesn't end up relying on a single point of failure), and delivering/serving the stuff efficiently.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- opportune 8y ago
  I don't think a long term, major content archival project is a good idea for a blockchain. Since the internet is so large, you would have to have major, major sharding (as opposed to the naive approach in bitcoin where all nodes contain the entire history). And additionally if you archive everything in an immutable datastore, you are going to end up archiving and then hosting illegal content, and afaik it is still not settled whether that constitutes a crime (in my opinion, it should).
- pcr910303 8y ago
  IIRC blockchains are for anonymized trust, not efficient archiving, right? I'm not sure if blockchains are going to become super useful when it comes to preserving the internet... :-(

0815test 8y ago

> It’ll take a long time to find a way to reliably save data that is served in a distributed sense That's actually easy - it's literally what blockchains are for. The whole issue is how to manage the tradeoff between reliably archiving everything (and expecting participants in the network to do the same, so that the system doesn't end up relying on a single point of failure), and delivering/serving the stuff efficiently.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
opportune 8y ago
I don't think a long term, major content archival project is a good idea for a blockchain. Since the internet is so large, you would have to have major, major sharding (as opposed to the naive approach in bitcoin where all nodes contain the entire history). And additionally if you archive everything in an immutable datastore, you are going to end up archiving and then hosting illegal content, and afaik it is still not settled whether that constitutes a crime (in my opinion, it should).
pcr910303 8y ago
IIRC blockchains are for anonymized trust, not efficient archiving, right? I'm not sure if blockchains are going to become super useful when it comes to preserving the internet... :-(