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Sadly, this mentality reminds me a lot of the great GeoCities purge of 2009. Have you considered partnering with the Internet Archive to back up any publicly-ac

by cyphar 6y ago

Sadly, this mentality reminds me a lot of the great GeoCities purge of 2009. Have you considered partnering with the Internet Archive to back up any publicly-accessible classic sites which you plan to purge? Whether or not a site has had visitors recently isn't a fair measure of the importance of those sites -- for instance, there were examples of digital shrines in GeoCities and Yahoo still decided to eradicate them all. It was only thanks to projects like the Internet Archive that we haven't lost that period of internet history just to free up some disk platter space. EDIT: I also am struggling to understand what this means: > To me, archiving those sites doesn't feel like destruction, it feels like backing up unused content and protecting it for the user. What does "archiving" mean here? Will the sites still be accessible or not? Is "archive" here a euphemism for "delete" -- in which case, how is it not like destruction and how is it like a "backup"? I'm not sure most people would consider "rm -rf" to be a backup strategy, but it definitely does have very good storage density.

csours 6y ago
There's a big disconnect between technological work and emotional work. If I make myself a digital scrapbook online, it may not have many visitors (or any) just like a scrapbook may sit on a shelf for years without being touched; but the emotional impact when you do pick it up again is huge. Kind of like comparing a scrapbook to a best seller novel.
mattzito 6y ago
"Archiving" means that each site will be converted into an HTML export and placed in their Google Drive, and a separate copy will be converted to a new site and placed in a draft (unpublished) state in their Google Drive. They can choose to republish that new Site, or take the HTML export and move it to a new platform of their choosing.
- prepend 6y ago
  And thus taking it offline. My concern isn’t that the files don’t exist any more,I think it’s nice to zip it and add it to the owners gdrive, my concern is that the files are no longer accessible on the web. So all the links are broken, no longer in search, etc. This seems like a much larger issue than archiving and it would be cool to hear how you all decided to take the sites offline. Is it a cost issue? I imagine hosting a billion static sites shouldn’t cost much.

by cyphar 6y ago

csours 6y ago

There's a big disconnect between technological work and emotional work. If I make myself a digital scrapbook online, it may not have many visitors (or any) just like a scrapbook may sit on a shelf for years without being touched; but the emotional impact when you do pick it up again is huge. Kind of like comparing a scrapbook to a best seller novel.

mattzito 6y ago

"Archiving" means that each site will be converted into an HTML export and placed in their Google Drive, and a separate copy will be converted to a new site and placed in a draft (unpublished) state in their Google Drive. They can choose to republish that new Site, or take the HTML export and move it to a new platform of their choosing.

prepend 6y ago
And thus taking it offline. My concern isn’t that the files don’t exist any more,I think it’s nice to zip it and add it to the owners gdrive, my concern is that the files are no longer accessible on the web. So all the links are broken, no longer in search, etc. This seems like a much larger issue than archiving and it would be cool to hear how you all decided to take the sites offline. Is it a cost issue? I imagine hosting a billion static sites shouldn’t cost much.