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I was involved with planning https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/ https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/ for just this reason --- hopefully we

I was involved with planning https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/ https://nlnet.nl/project/SoftwareHeritage-P2P/ for just this reason --- hopefully we will finally be able to start work on it sometime too far off. Indeed the real challenge of archival is not loosing the stuff, by making sure that people can still find the stuff. "Orphaned" information that no one knows exists, or is bothering to interact with, isn't that valuable compared to resources that are actively being used and still "live" in the culture. Of course, the archive can never serve the same amount of bandwidth, but the goal is a) interested parties can mirror the stuff they care about in a higher bandwidth / item way after some huge disruption c) random viewers never notice something going down, nor who is serving the info, but just a temporary drop in connection quality. Ultimately, location-based addressing is a stupid way to run society, needlessly fragile by baking in very property claims (IPs, DNS, etc.) that are incidental to the task at hand. Content-based addressing, with location based hints to avoid trying to solve really hard problems all at once, is the only way to make culture more robust.

btown 5y ago
The great thing about location-based addressing is that an archive of the set of known locations is not subject to the same ownership rules as the canonical live version of those addresses. A document listing all Geocities URLs can be placed in content-addressed storage without needing geocities.com to be owned by the party that emplaces that document. And a chain can be maintained such that people are incentivized to remember that document into the far future. Coupled with archival of the actual content, you bypass the exclusivity of domain ownership. Of course, ensuring that there's persistence of attention as well is a tougher problem. But one only needs to look at sites like https://reddit.com/r/tumblr https://reddit.com/r/tumblr to realize that there is immense societal interest in "meme archaeology." Reducing the barriers to entry to would-be archaeologists, giving them a "chain" of breadcrumbs that lead to content, and building communities that will socially reward people for their archaeology work, is the best thing we can possibly do.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  > The great thing about location-based addressing is that an archive of the set of known locations is not subject to the same ownership rules as the canonical live version of those addresses. Erm, to me this sounds like putting up with link rot as hack around bad IP law? There are already IP exceptions for preservation. And if content-addressing was the norm, geocities-type sites might bow to market pressure to not "own" the content, but merely have some some sort of license for being the exclusive pinning service and running the ads or whatever. This is like avoiding the problem where your the rent on your current apartment doesn't fall as much as the market writ large because your landlord knows moving is not free.

btown 5y ago

The great thing about location-based addressing is that an archive of the set of known locations is not subject to the same ownership rules as the canonical live version of those addresses. A document listing all Geocities URLs can be placed in content-addressed storage without needing geocities.com to be owned by the party that emplaces that document. And a chain can be maintained such that people are incentivized to remember that document into the far future. Coupled with archival of the actual content, you bypass the exclusivity of domain ownership. Of course, ensuring that there's persistence of attention as well is a tougher problem. But one only needs to look at sites like https://reddit.com/r/tumblr https://reddit.com/r/tumblr to realize that there is immense societal interest in "meme archaeology." Reducing the barriers to entry to would-be archaeologists, giving them a "chain" of breadcrumbs that lead to content, and building communities that will socially reward people for their archaeology work, is the best thing we can possibly do.

Ericson2314 5y ago
> The great thing about location-based addressing is that an archive of the set of known locations is not subject to the same ownership rules as the canonical live version of those addresses. Erm, to me this sounds like putting up with link rot as hack around bad IP law? There are already IP exceptions for preservation. And if content-addressing was the norm, geocities-type sites might bow to market pressure to not "own" the content, but merely have some some sort of license for being the exclusive pinning service and running the ads or whatever. This is like avoiding the problem where your the rent on your current apartment doesn't fall as much as the market writ large because your landlord knows moving is not free.