4 ms·

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 torr

by 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/

by kixiQu 5y ago

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/