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They could host the static dumps in perpetuity at the same urls. The cost would be a rounding error for them. Any idea if Google donates to The Web Archive Pr

They could host the static dumps in perpetuity at the same urls. The cost would be a rounding error for them. Any idea if Google donates to The Web Archive Project? I hope so. That would absolve them to some degree. I know a company shouldn't be responsible for storing people's content indefinitely but I hate the fact that human culture has become so transient.

ghaff 6y ago
Human culture has always been so transient. How many diaries, family photos, letters (even/especially email), etc. from even 30 years ago have been preserved? Much less 100 years. What has been passed down, especially publicly, are pretty rare exceptions.
- minimuffins 6y ago
  I don't know. In the past a lot of material culture survived for thousands of years by total accident. A lot of objects survived just because nobody ever bothered to destroy them, and could be found later. It's a different situation here. A lot of cultural objects' survival is now contingent on whether their continued existence happens to be profitable for whatever tech firm happens to be maintaining their material infrastructure.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Certainly digital information has to be deliberately preserved and doing so has challenges relative to anything physical. That said, with a few exceptions (e.g. papyrus in very dry conditions), pretty much anything on paper/parchment needs to be deliberately preserved as well. And, as you get to wetter climates e.g. Britain, there is very little preserved from post-Roman Medieval times. But I won't really argue that preserving the public web should probably be done by public institutions rather than depending almost solely on one non-profit organization. Because it's not reasonable to expect, for example, a website that's been hosted on some provider to be saved forever by that provider once the monthly bill stops being paid. (And that provider will probably go out of business sooner or later anyway.) Do you even want to bet on Google or Facebook being around in 50 or 100 years?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Cheyana 6y ago
  I read this many years ago, back when I read everything by Sterling. It is still relevant and probably always will be... https://medium.com/@bruces/digital-decay-2001-b0db0ca4be3c https://medium.com/@bruces/digital-decay-2001-b0db0ca4be3c
kevincox 6y ago
I think hosting the static dumps for owners that don't approve the auto-migration (and don't manually migrate) would be a great idea. Sure, you can't update your site without migrating in the future, but you can always fix up the auto-migration after the fact. The important thing is that this would keep the old sites alive with a high fidelity.
mattzito 6y ago
Hi, thanks for the feedback. To be clear, we invested a lot of time and effort internally trying to find a path forward where we could support hosting the sites as static dumps and continue serving them. At no point was the cost in terms of compute/storage/network even a consideration. In the end, it turned out to be extremely difficult to do as you describe. First, static sites, for us, aren't really static - there's dynamic content on a page, there's certain core components that we have to be able to serve, for example, we have to have a mechanism for people to report abusive sites, have to have a mechanism to remove those sites, and we also have to have the ability for users to request the deletion of these sites, and so on. In the end, it was going to come with a significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience. We felt it was better to be clear with users that we are going to transition them to the new platform along with providing them with a backup of their content to insure nothing was lost. I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors). In addition, more than 90% of users currently choose new sites when they are building a site, so we are giving users a long window of notice to decide how they want to handle their sites, whether active or inactive.
- ramses0 6y ago
  “Google search doesn’t surface sites hosted on google sites, therefore the sites get no visitors, therefore we will remove the sites. Q.E.D.” “””Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”””
  - TLightful 6y ago
    “””Our company mission is to organize the world's * adverts * and make them universally accessible and useful.””” Fixed. I have no use for Google any more. They were relevant 10 years ago but no more.
- jolmg 6y ago
  > I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors). That content is old does not make it worthless. That it's not receiving visitors (much less for as little as 2 years) does not make it worthless. If you're ever looking for the historical reason of something, the answer is probably going to be in a source that nobody's laid eyes on for several, several years.

ghaff 6y ago

Human culture has always been so transient. How many diaries, family photos, letters (even/especially email), etc. from even 30 years ago have been preserved? Much less 100 years. What has been passed down, especially publicly, are pretty rare exceptions.

minimuffins 6y ago
I don't know. In the past a lot of material culture survived for thousands of years by total accident. A lot of objects survived just because nobody ever bothered to destroy them, and could be found later. It's a different situation here. A lot of cultural objects' survival is now contingent on whether their continued existence happens to be profitable for whatever tech firm happens to be maintaining their material infrastructure.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Certainly digital information has to be deliberately preserved and doing so has challenges relative to anything physical. That said, with a few exceptions (e.g. papyrus in very dry conditions), pretty much anything on paper/parchment needs to be deliberately preserved as well. And, as you get to wetter climates e.g. Britain, there is very little preserved from post-Roman Medieval times. But I won't really argue that preserving the public web should probably be done by public institutions rather than depending almost solely on one non-profit organization. Because it's not reasonable to expect, for example, a website that's been hosted on some provider to be saved forever by that provider once the monthly bill stops being paid. (And that provider will probably go out of business sooner or later anyway.) Do you even want to bet on Google or Facebook being around in 50 or 100 years?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Cheyana 6y ago
I read this many years ago, back when I read everything by Sterling. It is still relevant and probably always will be... https://medium.com/@bruces/digital-decay-2001-b0db0ca4be3c https://medium.com/@bruces/digital-decay-2001-b0db0ca4be3c

kevincox 6y ago

I think hosting the static dumps for owners that don't approve the auto-migration (and don't manually migrate) would be a great idea. Sure, you can't update your site without migrating in the future, but you can always fix up the auto-migration after the fact. The important thing is that this would keep the old sites alive with a high fidelity.

mattzito 6y ago

Hi, thanks for the feedback. To be clear, we invested a lot of time and effort internally trying to find a path forward where we could support hosting the sites as static dumps and continue serving them. At no point was the cost in terms of compute/storage/network even a consideration. In the end, it turned out to be extremely difficult to do as you describe. First, static sites, for us, aren't really static - there's dynamic content on a page, there's certain core components that we have to be able to serve, for example, we have to have a mechanism for people to report abusive sites, have to have a mechanism to remove those sites, and we also have to have the ability for users to request the deletion of these sites, and so on. In the end, it was going to come with a significant amount of engineering cost to continue to deliver static sites, even with reduced fidelity and a worse user experience. We felt it was better to be clear with users that we are going to transition them to the new platform along with providing them with a backup of their content to insure nothing was lost. I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors). In addition, more than 90% of users currently choose new sites when they are building a site, so we are giving users a long window of notice to decide how they want to handle their sites, whether active or inactive.

ramses0 6y ago
“Google search doesn’t surface sites hosted on google sites, therefore the sites get no visitors, therefore we will remove the sites. Q.E.D.” “””Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”””
- TLightful 6y ago
  “””Our company mission is to organize the world's * adverts * and make them universally accessible and useful.””” Fixed. I have no use for Google any more. They were relevant 10 years ago but no more.
jolmg 6y ago
> I'll say that the vast majority of current classic sites are extremely old and inactive, and not receiving any traffic in the last two years (editors or visitors). That content is old does not make it worthless. That it's not receiving visitors (much less for as little as 2 years) does not make it worthless. If you're ever looking for the historical reason of something, the answer is probably going to be in a source that nobody's laid eyes on for several, several years.