8 ms·

Archive.is owner on “continuity of his project”

190 points by spzx 5y ago

spzx 5y ago
Also some interesting numbers in this post: >How much does hosting cost you per month at the moment? >about ~$2600/mo of pure expenses on servers/domains, not counting “work time”, “buying laptop/furniture”, etc. ($100…300/mo covered by donations + $300…500 by ads) https://blog.archive.today/post/659383959382294528/you-said-that-before-you-die-of-old-age-you-would https://blog.archive.today/post/659383959382294528/you-said-...
- john_moscow 5y ago
  As someone who managed to get more or less donation campaigns in the past, here are my 2 cents. There's a huge difference between "please donate to our project" and "it costs us $X/month to run it, we have Y users and managed to collect $Z so far, please donate". The first one will get you about $1 per 10K-1M users. The second one will get your goal fulfilled, as long as you are reasonable, and have enough users. All it takes is a noticeable message and a way to update it automatically based on the money received.
kixiQu 5y ago
This is a very fair answer, and all "permalinks" are lies. At the same time, I wonder if it might not be possible to have snapshots up on, I dunno, IPFS or torrent sites or something such that when the unavoidable happens, not all is lost.
- golemotron 5y ago
  Yes, the site owner's response seems excessively didactic when a system of mirrors would solve the problem.
  - ragona 5y ago
    Mirrors don't solve the problem, they move it.
    - dewey 5y ago
      How is a mirror not solving the problem of data loss if a single instance goes away?
      - gambler 5y ago
        The problem isn't a single instance going away. The problem is what happens when for whatever reason the owner stops maintaining the project. This is a common problem and despite all the bluster and buzzwords, the IT community hasn't really found a solution. Torrents are the only kind-of-solution, but they are not ideal for something that needs to be constantly updated.
        aabbcc1241 5y ago
        Zeronet may help for content that need to be updated
  - wolrah 5y ago
    > a system of mirrors would solve the problem. A system of mirrors prevents a single node going down from taking the whole system (in theory at least, we've all seen plenty of times where failover goes poorly), but it doesn't do anything to ensure the long term survival of the system as people lose interest, lose the ability to participate, and sometimes die. If you were around certain internet forums in the late '00s you might have run in to an image hosting platform called WaffleImages which was created in response to yet another popular free image hosting service locking down their embedding and ruining thousands of old posts. The goal was to distribute image hosting among community-operated mirrors, and it worked great for a few years. Over time though people lost interest while the rate of new mirrors getting added dropped to basically zero and eventually it fell apart.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Depending on the format of the archives (hopefully WARC), the owner could hand the entire archive over to the Internet Archive or Archive Team for ingestion by Wayback Machine. If the concern is perpetual access to archived content but under your terms, that is where the cost comes in. Somebody somewhere is paying for power, cooling, connectivity, and disks. The Internet Archive estimates it costs them $2/GB to host data uploaded in perpetuity. Please consider donating if you're uploading content for permanent archival and/or deriving value from hosted content.
  - SllX 5y ago
    Pretty much. If you really want to maintain access to old stuff in perpetuity, you have to pay for it yourself by either storing it on your own equipment or paying someone to store it on theirs.
    - kixiQu 5y ago
      Sure -- but at least with something p2p hooked up to it I can let someone else benefit from my desire to assure my own access.
      - SllX 5y ago
        Yep, I agree.
  - benjaminikuta 5y ago
    The Internet Archive isn't perfect either. They can be pressured to remove pages.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      It's not perfect. If you desire to store content that the Internet Archive must dark for whatever legal or compliance reasons, you'll have to cover the cost for that storage. The cost will always be non zero to perform such an operation.
- kordlessagain 5y ago
  An image of a Web asset is useful for archival purposes and may be indexed using text recognition ML.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Images take up way more space than HTML documents… actually, what with how bloated most “websites” are these days, that's probably not true any more.
- dannyw 5y ago
  nothing is permanent in life. heaps of torrents i want have 0 seeders. ipfs's economically incentivised hosting layer (filecoin) offers storage in monthly increments, not perpetual.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    > nothing is permanent in life practically yes, but https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- legrande 5y ago
  > This is a very fair answer, and all "permalinks" are lies Cool URIs don't change: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html You can believe that cool URIs don't change or you could go the IPFS route. Similar to the way torrents have a 'health' score of plenty of seeders, and IPFS resources could live as long as people want that resource to exist (Not sure if that situation is baked into IPFS though). Also: have you looked into Filecoin?[0] [0] https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/
fouc 5y ago
Archive.is is an incredible service, but the fact he's paying out $3k-4k/mo out of pocket in expenses & time doesn't strike me as sustainable for the long term. I'm reminded of some non-profit organization that was forced to shut down their websites because they ran out of money. In retrospect they could've setup a trust fund early on, stuck all their money in there, and then had a perpetual annual income from that for operating costs, instead of spending down. All fundraising could've gone into the trust fund in order to boost the annual budget, etc.
growt 5y ago
He better also has built some savings for legal defense. Because he could easily be sued into oblivion especially in Europe.
glofish 5y ago
There is an interesting conundrum here, when we post to the internet do we also consent to having that information saved for all eternity? Archiving everything is still a novel and not fully understood concept it is not that clear that it is useful or beneficial over long term. Forgetting can be a bliss.
- rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
  What blissful times we lived in before the daily drumbeat of “Accomplished young professional discovered to have said offensive things on the internet when they were a dumb teenager, reputation tarred and feathered for the rest of their life.”
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    we don’t know if it’ll be a lifelong thing though. I suspect with all this pushback and emotional exhaustion (and I really do believe it’s emotionally exhausting to constantly be hounding over peoples morality on the internet) people will just stop giving a shit about what someone said 5 years ago pretty soon.
    - rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
      It’s a numbers game. Billions of people won’t care, but a few dozen can make enough of a stink that a habitually risk averse institution would rather let someone be canceled than risk the controversy snowballing into something bigger.
      - thingification 5y ago
        Only if we let them. There are all kinds of feedback cycles going on. Neither of these two are rational: 1. There are no ways to correct the problem you describe 2. The problem will correct itself without individuals and institutions making it happen
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
ignoramous 5y ago
archive.is is my browser to text-heavy websites like blogs, news, twitter, and documentation (outline.com is another one, reader mode, yet another). It completely debloats a webpage as it archives (unlike web.archive.org, say). Suits my purposes just fine. I must note though, archive.is (from what I recall), forwards IP address of whoever initiated an archive process to the origin. archive.is was also a great mirror to instagram and linkedin for public profiles, but it doesn't archive instagram anymore.
- spzx 5y ago
  Here's his quote on instagram archiving problems: "There is no Instagram content which don’t need to login. If you can access the page without login, it is sort of “promo preview“, after few pages accessed this way, they add your IP into “promo is over“ list and will redirect to /login on every future request. I just have not enough fresh IPs to abuse this mechanism." https://blog.archive.today/post/659927354404192256/instagram-postsprofiles-no-longer-working https://blog.archive.today/post/659927354404192256/instagram...
Seattle3503 5y ago
Didn't realize people used it for anything other than getting around paywalls.
- john-doe 5y ago
  That's my main use and sometimes feel bad about it, since I just want to see the content and not archive some mediocre article for “posterity”.
rosetremiere 5y ago
About reliable email adresses: I'm using my university alumni "email forwarding for life", but this loses me some emails due to DMARC and friends. What are the alternatives?
- autarch 5y ago
  Register your own domain and use that for email. Then you can move that domain's email service to different providers. I use Gmail right now, but I could move my domain's email to Fastmail or another provider without _too_ much work. Of course, it's also a good idea to back up your email archives too, since that _can_ go away with the loss of a provider's service.
  - thom 5y ago
    I’ve recently migrated four different accounts, three of them Gmail with their own domains, to Fastmail and I was astonished by how easy the process (that I’d put off for _years_) was. Huge weight off my mind and I’ve been very happy with the service since then.
  - raxi 5y ago
    Domain "ownership" is too fragile. Well, you do not lose the email archive, but new domain "owner" could steal you identity.
glanard_frugner 5y ago
even if we archive everything, hundreds of years from now all of “the worlds information” could very well be unusable and unreadable for a variety of factors(no one remembers how to deal with the file formats, EMP, bit rot). books however will continue to work just fine as they have for thousands of years
- derivagral 5y ago
  If we're talking that long of a timescale, how long does your typical book these days actually last? I'm no expert, but it makes me wonder how long consumer paper actually lasts. Reasonable(?) search result below. https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-paper-to-decompose https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-paper-to-dec...
  - glanard_frugner 5y ago
    adding paper to a compost pile will give different results than keeping a book stored in the proper conditions
Shank 5y ago
Archive.is still doesn’t work if you use Cloudflare DNS due to a spat with Cloudflare and the operator. So to me, the continuity and reliability is already a big question. Not only is it a question of sustainability economically, but also ideologically: what happens if another similar decision is made to lock out a portion of users?
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  For reference: the spat is that Cloudflare DNS does not leak geographic information of the queryer through EDNS, and the archive.is fellow is requiring geographic information to provide valid DNS lookups. So he intentionally sends back bad results when it is 1.1.1.1 querying his nameservers. I love the site, but his stance on this doesn't really make sense to me, and it's a shame that millions and millions of people use 1.1.1.1 daily and archive.is is the one website that doesn't work for those people.
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    > I love the site, but his stance on this doesn't really make sense to me would not be surprised if he has some personal axe to grind with cf (they are no sheep either). also i would be wary of overestimating market penetration of any 3rd-party dns provider; iirc google has total dominance of this segment and is still below 10%.
  - slim 5y ago
    Millions use 1.1.1.1 ? Any source for that ?
    - sp332 5y ago
      The Android app has 418,000 reviews and over 50 million installs, and the iPhone app has 230,000 reviews. The number of people who use it without an app is probably a lot higher.
  - spzx 5y ago
    HN discussion from 2019 on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
indigodaddy 5y ago
Perhaps he can somehow join forces with archive.org? Maybe they take over when/if he is no longer able to do it?
indigodaddy 5y ago
On a related note, I guess Tumblr is still around to use as a blog ?
- goodrubyist 5y ago
  Yes it has been around, but it's quite jarring to see anyone actually use it.
dmix 5y ago
I see the answer to this question more around backups and helping future people overcome technical limitations (knowledge transfer + data archiving). All things are ephemeral after a certain point but archiving typically lasts much much longer than the human operators. Likewise documenting the process and barriers to overcome will help people in the future solve the problem (and a broader amount of people). This doesn't have to be public, just needs a way to become public.
jeffalo 5y ago
Does any one know what's up with all the different domains for archive.is? The blog is at blog.archive.today, it calls itself the "archive.is blog", but when I visit archive.is or archive.today, I'm brought to archive.vn. When I click the "archive.today" logo in the header, I'm taken to archive.ph
- benjaminikuta 5y ago
  He's mentioned this before. He has multiple domains because they can go down sometimes.
- spzx 5y ago
  According to my understanding: archive.today/archive.is are the main domains the service is known under, others are mirrors selected depending on country you are located in (because of domain bans in some countries). Site owner said once archive.today is the domain to use when linking because it will automatically redirect to the correct one.

190 points by spzx 5y ago

spzx 5y ago

Also some interesting numbers in this post: >How much does hosting cost you per month at the moment? >about ~$2600/mo of pure expenses on servers/domains, not counting “work time”, “buying laptop/furniture”, etc. ($100…300/mo covered by donations + $300…500 by ads) https://blog.archive.today/post/659383959382294528/you-said-that-before-you-die-of-old-age-you-would https://blog.archive.today/post/659383959382294528/you-said-...

john_moscow 5y ago
As someone who managed to get more or less donation campaigns in the past, here are my 2 cents. There's a huge difference between "please donate to our project" and "it costs us $X/month to run it, we have Y users and managed to collect $Z so far, please donate". The first one will get you about $1 per 10K-1M users. The second one will get your goal fulfilled, as long as you are reasonable, and have enough users. All it takes is a noticeable message and a way to update it automatically based on the money received.

kixiQu 5y ago

This is a very fair answer, and all "permalinks" are lies. At the same time, I wonder if it might not be possible to have snapshots up on, I dunno, IPFS or torrent sites or something such that when the unavoidable happens, not all is lost.

golemotron 5y ago
Yes, the site owner's response seems excessively didactic when a system of mirrors would solve the problem.
- ragona 5y ago
  Mirrors don't solve the problem, they move it.
  - dewey 5y ago
    How is a mirror not solving the problem of data loss if a single instance goes away?
    - gambler 5y ago
      The problem isn't a single instance going away. The problem is what happens when for whatever reason the owner stops maintaining the project. This is a common problem and despite all the bluster and buzzwords, the IT community hasn't really found a solution. Torrents are the only kind-of-solution, but they are not ideal for something that needs to be constantly updated.
      - aabbcc1241 5y ago
        Zeronet may help for content that need to be updated
- wolrah 5y ago
  > a system of mirrors would solve the problem. A system of mirrors prevents a single node going down from taking the whole system (in theory at least, we've all seen plenty of times where failover goes poorly), but it doesn't do anything to ensure the long term survival of the system as people lose interest, lose the ability to participate, and sometimes die. If you were around certain internet forums in the late '00s you might have run in to an image hosting platform called WaffleImages which was created in response to yet another popular free image hosting service locking down their embedding and ruining thousands of old posts. The goal was to distribute image hosting among community-operated mirrors, and it worked great for a few years. Over time though people lost interest while the rate of new mirrors getting added dropped to basically zero and eventually it fell apart.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Depending on the format of the archives (hopefully WARC), the owner could hand the entire archive over to the Internet Archive or Archive Team for ingestion by Wayback Machine. If the concern is perpetual access to archived content but under your terms, that is where the cost comes in. Somebody somewhere is paying for power, cooling, connectivity, and disks. The Internet Archive estimates it costs them $2/GB to host data uploaded in perpetuity. Please consider donating if you're uploading content for permanent archival and/or deriving value from hosted content.
- SllX 5y ago
  Pretty much. If you really want to maintain access to old stuff in perpetuity, you have to pay for it yourself by either storing it on your own equipment or paying someone to store it on theirs.
  - kixiQu 5y ago
    Sure -- but at least with something p2p hooked up to it I can let someone else benefit from my desire to assure my own access.
    - SllX 5y ago
      Yep, I agree.
- benjaminikuta 5y ago
  The Internet Archive isn't perfect either. They can be pressured to remove pages.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    It's not perfect. If you desire to store content that the Internet Archive must dark for whatever legal or compliance reasons, you'll have to cover the cost for that storage. The cost will always be non zero to perform such an operation.
kordlessagain 5y ago
An image of a Web asset is useful for archival purposes and may be indexed using text recognition ML.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  Images take up way more space than HTML documents… actually, what with how bloated most “websites” are these days, that's probably not true any more.
dannyw 5y ago
nothing is permanent in life. heaps of torrents i want have 0 seeders. ipfs's economically incentivised hosting layer (filecoin) offers storage in monthly increments, not perpetual.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  > nothing is permanent in life practically yes, but https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
legrande 5y ago
> This is a very fair answer, and all "permalinks" are lies Cool URIs don't change: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html You can believe that cool URIs don't change or you could go the IPFS route. Similar to the way torrents have a 'health' score of plenty of seeders, and IPFS resources could live as long as people want that resource to exist (Not sure if that situation is baked into IPFS though). Also: have you looked into Filecoin?[0] [0] https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/

fouc 5y ago

Archive.is is an incredible service, but the fact he's paying out $3k-4k/mo out of pocket in expenses & time doesn't strike me as sustainable for the long term. I'm reminded of some non-profit organization that was forced to shut down their websites because they ran out of money. In retrospect they could've setup a trust fund early on, stuck all their money in there, and then had a perpetual annual income from that for operating costs, instead of spending down. All fundraising could've gone into the trust fund in order to boost the annual budget, etc.

growt 5y ago

He better also has built some savings for legal defense. Because he could easily be sued into oblivion especially in Europe.

glofish 5y ago

There is an interesting conundrum here, when we post to the internet do we also consent to having that information saved for all eternity? Archiving everything is still a novel and not fully understood concept it is not that clear that it is useful or beneficial over long term. Forgetting can be a bliss.

rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
What blissful times we lived in before the daily drumbeat of “Accomplished young professional discovered to have said offensive things on the internet when they were a dumb teenager, reputation tarred and feathered for the rest of their life.”
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  we don’t know if it’ll be a lifelong thing though. I suspect with all this pushback and emotional exhaustion (and I really do believe it’s emotionally exhausting to constantly be hounding over peoples morality on the internet) people will just stop giving a shit about what someone said 5 years ago pretty soon.
  - rm_-rf_slash 5y ago
    It’s a numbers game. Billions of people won’t care, but a few dozen can make enough of a stink that a habitually risk averse institution would rather let someone be canceled than risk the controversy snowballing into something bigger.
    - thingification 5y ago
      Only if we let them. There are all kinds of feedback cycles going on. Neither of these two are rational: 1. There are no ways to correct the problem you describe 2. The problem will correct itself without individuals and institutions making it happen
SkyMarshal 5y ago

ignoramous 5y ago

archive.is is my browser to text-heavy websites like blogs, news, twitter, and documentation (outline.com is another one, reader mode, yet another). It completely debloats a webpage as it archives (unlike web.archive.org, say). Suits my purposes just fine. I must note though, archive.is (from what I recall), forwards IP address of whoever initiated an archive process to the origin. archive.is was also a great mirror to instagram and linkedin for public profiles, but it doesn't archive instagram anymore.

spzx 5y ago
Here's his quote on instagram archiving problems: "There is no Instagram content which don’t need to login. If you can access the page without login, it is sort of “promo preview“, after few pages accessed this way, they add your IP into “promo is over“ list and will redirect to /login on every future request. I just have not enough fresh IPs to abuse this mechanism." https://blog.archive.today/post/659927354404192256/instagram-postsprofiles-no-longer-working https://blog.archive.today/post/659927354404192256/instagram...

Seattle3503 5y ago

Didn't realize people used it for anything other than getting around paywalls.

john-doe 5y ago
That's my main use and sometimes feel bad about it, since I just want to see the content and not archive some mediocre article for “posterity”.

rosetremiere 5y ago

About reliable email adresses: I'm using my university alumni "email forwarding for life", but this loses me some emails due to DMARC and friends. What are the alternatives?

autarch 5y ago
Register your own domain and use that for email. Then you can move that domain's email service to different providers. I use Gmail right now, but I could move my domain's email to Fastmail or another provider without _too_ much work. Of course, it's also a good idea to back up your email archives too, since that _can_ go away with the loss of a provider's service.
- thom 5y ago
  I’ve recently migrated four different accounts, three of them Gmail with their own domains, to Fastmail and I was astonished by how easy the process (that I’d put off for _years_) was. Huge weight off my mind and I’ve been very happy with the service since then.
- raxi 5y ago
  Domain "ownership" is too fragile. Well, you do not lose the email archive, but new domain "owner" could steal you identity.

glanard_frugner 5y ago

even if we archive everything, hundreds of years from now all of “the worlds information” could very well be unusable and unreadable for a variety of factors(no one remembers how to deal with the file formats, EMP, bit rot). books however will continue to work just fine as they have for thousands of years

derivagral 5y ago
If we're talking that long of a timescale, how long does your typical book these days actually last? I'm no expert, but it makes me wonder how long consumer paper actually lasts. Reasonable(?) search result below. https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-paper-to-decompose https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-paper-to-dec...
- glanard_frugner 5y ago
  adding paper to a compost pile will give different results than keeping a book stored in the proper conditions

Shank 5y ago

Archive.is still doesn’t work if you use Cloudflare DNS due to a spat with Cloudflare and the operator. So to me, the continuity and reliability is already a big question. Not only is it a question of sustainability economically, but also ideologically: what happens if another similar decision is made to lock out a portion of users?

oh_sigh 5y ago
For reference: the spat is that Cloudflare DNS does not leak geographic information of the queryer through EDNS, and the archive.is fellow is requiring geographic information to provide valid DNS lookups. So he intentionally sends back bad results when it is 1.1.1.1 querying his nameservers. I love the site, but his stance on this doesn't really make sense to me, and it's a shame that millions and millions of people use 1.1.1.1 daily and archive.is is the one website that doesn't work for those people.
- hansel_der 5y ago
  > I love the site, but his stance on this doesn't really make sense to me would not be surprised if he has some personal axe to grind with cf (they are no sheep either). also i would be wary of overestimating market penetration of any 3rd-party dns provider; iirc google has total dominance of this segment and is still below 10%.
- slim 5y ago
  Millions use 1.1.1.1 ? Any source for that ?
  - sp332 5y ago
    The Android app has 418,000 reviews and over 50 million installs, and the iPhone app has 230,000 reviews. The number of people who use it without an app is probably a lot higher.
- spzx 5y ago
  HN discussion from 2019 on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317

indigodaddy 5y ago

Perhaps he can somehow join forces with archive.org? Maybe they take over when/if he is no longer able to do it?

indigodaddy 5y ago

On a related note, I guess Tumblr is still around to use as a blog ?

goodrubyist 5y ago
Yes it has been around, but it's quite jarring to see anyone actually use it.

dmix 5y ago

I see the answer to this question more around backups and helping future people overcome technical limitations (knowledge transfer + data archiving). All things are ephemeral after a certain point but archiving typically lasts much much longer than the human operators. Likewise documenting the process and barriers to overcome will help people in the future solve the problem (and a broader amount of people). This doesn't have to be public, just needs a way to become public.

jeffalo 5y ago

Does any one know what's up with all the different domains for archive.is? The blog is at blog.archive.today, it calls itself the "archive.is blog", but when I visit archive.is or archive.today, I'm brought to archive.vn. When I click the "archive.today" logo in the header, I'm taken to archive.ph

benjaminikuta 5y ago
He's mentioned this before. He has multiple domains because they can go down sometimes.
spzx 5y ago
According to my understanding: archive.today/archive.is are the main domains the service is known under, others are mirrors selected depending on country you are located in (because of domain bans in some countries). Site owner said once archive.today is the domain to use when linking because it will automatically redirect to the correct one.