7 ms·

Keep Our Servers Running

1057 points by sonicrocketman 25d ago

retox 25d ago
[dead]
sonicrocketman 25d ago
Just posting this so others can be reminded to donate the archive (no association by me, just a fan).
totalconfusion 25d ago
Who's paying?
- deleted 25d ago
  [deleted]
- killingtime74 25d ago
  I click through to a few links and cannot find who is doing the matching
  - Daneel_ 25d ago
    That’s what I want to know before committing too.
- colesantiago 25d ago
  Let's be honest, almost nobody is donating a significant amount i.e. $100K+ to the Internet Archive that would actually keep them alive. Everyone wants to scrape and extract from them 100% for free.
  - j16sdiz 25d ago
    No. The question OP ask was.... who is paying for the matching? The donation got 3x, sure somebody is paying, right? I was planning to donate, and this omission stopped me.
    - losteric 25d ago
      why?? It's extremely common for nonprofits to have anonymous matching donors. Even my local animal shelter.
      - Daneel_ 25d ago
        Then why not just say that in the post? "Our matching donor wishes to remain anonymous, but we thank them for their generosity" Simple.
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 25d ago
      Why are you guys getting worked up over this? What's wrong with donors wanting to be anonymous?
      - ssl-3 25d ago
        It's OK for a donor that provides matching funds to wish for, and to be granted, anonymity. It's also OK for primary donors to be suspicious of this for any reason that they choose, including no reason at all. Maybe the matching-funds donor is all peachy and clean. Maybe they're the root of all evil. We don't know. This lack of knowledge doesn't let people make an informed decision, and people are allowed to seek to make informed decisions and to get turned off when that isn't possible. :) (For the record: I'm more motivated to toss a few dollars in the hat when there's a multiplier at play than when there is not. I don't really care who it is that supplies the extra money. My mentality might lead me to a situation wherein my donation to the local orphanage is anonymously multiplied by a nearby orphan crushing facility that turns lost kids into soylent green, but it's a risk that I'm willing to take. Others are free to be as averse or accepting as they wish.)
        25d ago
- lukeify 25d ago
  Truly stunning that they omitted this information.
pm90 25d ago
It was super easy to donate; Im so glad they have a landing page that supports several payment methods and makes it easy to donate. I love the wayback machine, hope everyone pitches in : ).
Cider9986 25d ago
THere's also archive.today who does great user-directed archiving. We don't appreciate this infrastructure some random guy runs enough. It's annoying how often archive.org blocks sites but they both complement each other very well. https://liberapay.com/archiveis/donate https://liberapay.com/archiveis/donate https://coindrop.to/archive https://coindrop.to/archive When finding archive.today's Monero donation address just now, I had to use archive.org because donatemonero.org [1] is down. https://web.archive.org/web/20260526080016/https://donatemonero.org/project/archive-is.html https://web.archive.org/web/20260526080016/https://donatemon...
- qingcharles 25d ago
  Absolutely deserves a donation too. How it keeps running is beyond me, especially as he/she/they keep adding more paywall bypasses on the backend.
  - esskay 25d ago
    It doesnt really deserve anything given they used the site to attack people. See the comment above yours.
    - vachina 25d ago
      I’d gladly join his/her botnet. archive.is is the only archive that acts like an archive.
      - esskay 25d ago
        That would be pretty crappy of you given he was attacking an innocent 3rd party. Morals be damned i guess.
        DaSHacka 25d ago
        "innocent" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. Does it change the calculus at all if this "innocent" person was trying to dox the operator for nothing more than satisfying a personal whim?
qingcharles 25d ago
Just donated. Appreciate the reminder.
arjie 25d ago
I do like the Internet Archive but I wish I could retrieve large segments from it myself. It has very aggressive 429s. It would be a nice higher donor tier feature. Maybe it’s not possible to do so and retain 501c3 status? Regardless I have had to start performing personal datahoarding. C’est la vie.
- eru 25d ago
  I wonder if they could sell you access to a bittorrent tracker? Officially it would be independent of the donations, just an extra service they sell?
  - queenkjuul 25d ago
    They have torrent downloads for a lot of content, I've downloaded almost a terabyte from them via torrent, they're just not bundled, as in you would need to retrieve each torrent file for each item individually, which might still get you a 429 if you automated it idk. I've never actually got a 429 using a browser though personally, they do throttle aggressively though
    - smolder 25d ago
      Anyone with a lot of data has to carefully apply limits to not get bankrupted by frontier AI people with residential proxies scraping the shit out of everything.
  - yreg 25d ago
    Why sell? I thought the idea of donating to them is to make the information available for everyone for free.
    - eru 24d ago
      Bandwidth costs money, and one could sell premium access to fund one's more public minded services.
- thechairman12 25d ago
deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
crewman9 25d ago
Yeah, _no_ Shut ClimateGPT down, apologize and then we can talk about donation.
- RileyJames 25d ago
  What should archive.org apologise for in this regard?
- eru 25d ago
  Interesting. How is ClimateGPT linked to archive.org, and why do you object to it?
  - stonogo 25d ago
    ClimateGPT is built by Erasmus.AI, which says "Built by Erasmus.AI on behalf of the ClimateGPT Foundation, and supported by the Internet Archive Europe,". Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive founder (and board chair), is on the board of Erasmus.AI. It does seem weird to rattle the donation box because hosting costs are going up while shooting money at the prime cause of hosting costs going up.
    - LastTrain 25d ago
      They are independent organizations with separate funding.
      - stonogo 25d ago
        Brewster Kahle is on IA Europe's board as well (with Daniel Erasmus, whose baby is Erasmus.AI). I'm sure they have separate bank accounts, but let's not pretend these organizations are independent. They're all run by the same little club of friends.
      - crewman9 25d ago
        then why did the main IA account post about this https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/117219501245722161 https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11721950124572... and it's darkly funny how HN downvotes this when every single answer on Mastodon is incredibly negative
akudha 25d ago
How do they handle AI slop? If they index AI generated articles, it is just not sustainable, right?
zetanor 25d ago
I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocably leaks your e-mail address: https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email (2009)). What's a lot harder to overlook is that the IA brazenly hosts warez on clearnet and pulls off stunts like the COVID "emergency library". I'm all for ending copyright, but does any of that really need to be linked with the Wayback Machine? Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a unique(ly valuable) source of information and history. It's not my call, but it seems strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism. What happens when some stick-up-the-ass company—whose stuff is probably in hundreds of different collections—decides it really wants a payday?
- frenchtoast8 24d ago
  How much did IA spend on legal fees, employee time, etc in their defense of the COVID emergency library that most people thought was a lost cause? I need to know where my donation dollars are going.
  - addy34 24d ago
    Tax filings are available here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943242767 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943... Rev. Costs(all) Legal ----------------------------- 2019 37 37 0.2 2020 22 20 0.4 2021 30 25 2.0 2022 31 26 1.8 2023 24 33 1.0 2024 27 24 2.2 USD millions. Legal is non-employee costs.
    - nijave 24d ago
      Are there on staff lawyers hiding in payroll or do they contract everything?
foo42 25d ago
Internet Archive feels like an important... well, archive, yet I often worry about the load, financial and potentially political, which is put on it when people use it as a workaround for pay-walls, as is often advocated on HN
- mr_mitm 25d ago
  That's a different archive
  - warpech 25d ago
    Umm, no? The parent means Wayback Machine, which is a service of Internet Archive (both at archive.org). Or am I confused?
    - mr_mitm 25d ago
      The archive that bypasses paywalls is archive.today (or archive.is, archive.ph, ...) which is run by some shady person, not a professional organization like Wayback Machine.
abeyer 25d ago
"Keep running" is interesting phrasing, given that wayback has been serving me nothing but some mix of timeouts, 429 errors, and "Temporarily Offline" messages for weeks.
- smolder 25d ago
  I've watched whole video series from their archives. What are you doing to get throttled?
  - badlibrarian 24d ago
    Which archives? Wayback is different from Archive. Which is different from Archive-It. And the problem with Wayback was power poles being set on fire by homeless people, then SF power in general, then "upgrades," then "bad actors," then hot weather causing the machines to slow down because they don't have air conditioning, evil AI companies, and now seems to be the fact that an organization backed by someone with nearly a billion dollars, founded 30 years ago, cannot source hard drives. https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c Fundraising drive coordinated with their loudest employee saying something else, because... of course.
    - smolder 24d ago
      Archive.org. I watched the whole of Norm Macdonalds "cancelled" (in the "cancel culture" sense) show/podcast on there. Oddly, he died a few days after I finished it.
      - badlibrarian 24d ago
        Different site, different backend, different problems. GP was talking about wayback.archive.org, which threw a 429 error just now when I verified the URL.
TekMol 25d ago
I still don't get how copying copyrighted content to your own website and then asking for donations can be a legal business model. Nor how it can be morally justified. I get that many people like such an archive to be around for consumption. Me too. But, keeping emotions aside, I can't find a justification to violate the rights of creators. I'm sure many people here will have the knee-jerk reaction to immediately downvote this question. But I know there are also thoughtful people on HN. If some of you have ideas about the legal and moral justification for archive.org's actions, I would like to hear them.
- neilwilson 25d ago
  Copyright is a legal grant from the public to the individual. Perhaps it is time to recognise that this literal Mickey Mouse law needs to be rebalanced more in favour of the public than the monopolist, as that creates better societal outcomes.
- spider-mario 25d ago
  “your own website and then asking for donations […] business model” make it sound as if it’s for profit, which it isn’t.
- pjc50 25d ago
  The legal justification is that it's a library. This does actually seem to work for them in general, although they badly overstepped with books and lost in court. Any creator-based outrage should be directed first and foremost at the for-profit violations by AI companies, rather than the small volunteer service which is keeping history up. Ultimately there is no archiving without piracy. The alternative is for the web to exist in an eternal present where everything vanishes the moment some business decides it's not worth it or conflicts with current corporate values.
- hk__2 25d ago
  It’s a non-profit that archives publicly-accessible content. If it were a for-profit (Google snippets, LLMs) I’d understand your question, but since it doesn’t profit from it I don’t see the issue.
- 25d ago
klamann 25d ago
Does the Internet Archive have any options to donate from the EU so I can get a donation receipt from a EU based non-profit? I know there is the "Internet Archive Europe", but that seems to be a Wikimedia like thing, i.e. they don't collect funds for the IA but for whatever it is they are doing here (which is not archiving websites for some reason?).
- ThePowerOfFuet 25d ago
  Send EUR via SEPA transfer to GB74RBOS16107510000470. (Yes, the page only mentions wire transfer, but SEPA transfers work too, are faster, and cost everyone less.) Source: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-wire-transfer/ https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-wire-transfer/
  - eis 25d ago
    Making a wire transfer is easy, but can it be deducted from taxes? That's the tricky part.
    - 47282847 25d ago
      No it can’t. Even across Europe it is not a given that the local tax authorities will easily accept the receipt. Charity law is national.
  - klamann 25d ago
    there would still be fees for a wire transfer from a EU bank to this bank in the US, right? And I wouldn't get a donation receipt that would be accepted by the tax man over here anyway.
    - edelbitter 25d ago
      RBOS is short for Royal Bank of Scotland. When accepting SEPA credit transfer (though they are not legally mandated to offer the instant execution variant), I don't think there is even a mechanism to sneak in extra fees, beyond what the sending institute already billed (typically: 0.00€).
theletterf 25d ago
Be careful: paying with Google Pay is extremely easy and the default setting is monthly recurrence. If you're not logged in, the only way to cancel (as far as I know) is by sending an email, which is incredibly precarious.
- John7878781 25d ago
  in those situations, especially if the business is unresponsive, i just keep charging back until they stop. if i can subscribe easily, i should be able to cancel just as easily :)
  - theletterf 25d ago
    Well, you can't if you paid using a debit card, like I did. Silly me.
    - Melatonic 25d ago
      You often still can actually. Call your bank
      - theletterf 25d ago
        Just did. Not possible in Spain.
        embedding-shape 25d ago
        Which bank? My main bank (I'm also in Spain) is BBVA which is able to do charge backs with my debit cards as well. Was possible with Banc Sabadell I used to have as well, really strange to hear there is a bank that doesn't support that today with debit cards.
    - eis 25d ago
      Debit cards can do chargebacks just as credit cards can do. That's a feature of Visa and Mastercard (and others). If your bank refuses, complain to the card network. Oh and consider changing banks, that's really unacceptable in 2026 and shows an anti customer stance.
spiderfarmer 25d ago
They should ask the AI scraping companies for donations.
- smolder 25d ago
  They probably have, hence the matching thing.
do_it_for_free 25d ago
They have some positions posted on their job board. I would do this for free. They should adopt a volunteer workforce like the Redcross Code4Good Volunteer Enterprise Web Services team. Senior Datacenter Network Infrastructure Engineer Full Time San Francisco, CA, US 30+ days ago Requisition ID: XXXX Salary Range: $140,000.00 To $200,000.00 Annually
- aurareturn 25d ago
  Pick 2 out of 3 for these kinds of volunteer work: - Capable - Reliable - Free You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free?
  - egorfine 25d ago
    > You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free? Yes. For the Internet Archive I totally would. As responsible as I do my main job.
    - aurareturn 25d ago
      You should definitely apply and sign a contract. They should charge you money if you don't show up at 3am in an outage. All it takes is one emergency and the volunteer person doesn't show up for the non profit to want to hire a full time person. This event has likely already occurred at Archive.
      - egorfine 25d ago
        This is a genuine consideration.
    - insom 24d ago
      The work required to keep IA infrastructure operating is full time: these are full-time positions. IIRC they were at ~70 racks of stuff just in the California locations and apart from on-call and emergency response there's growth to keep up with, future planning etc. There's no reasonable world where this is a few hour's per week volunteering like your local boat club. It's a Top 200 website, around the size of the Guardian newspaper -- never mind that Wayback is only a small portion of what they do. (Book scanning, inter-library loans, paid services for other GLAM organizations and governments etc.)
xyst 25d ago
Why can’t these wealthy donors funding the "match" just pay a lump sum? Why make IA and other non profits jump through hoops to get the full amount?
- loeg 25d ago
  (They do. The "matching" is just a fundraising gimmick; essentially a lie.)
esskay 25d ago
I'm quite surprised they havent also adopted a high paying sponsorship model. If they had something and large hosting providers were pressured into sponsoring them by customers they'd have no funding issues. Also why arent they on opencollective? Surely thats a no brainer!
tossandthrow 25d ago
2:1 by who? That is not written. These types of schemes ring very poorly in my head for charity. If someone has the ability to give 2$ for every 1$ I give, why are they only giving on contingence? Just give the money!
- conformist 25d ago
  Value judgment aside: Probably because it works well empirically. If you’re a larger scale donor and you’re interested in maximising impact, you may agree to a matching program type setup to crowd in more donors. Also you feel smart because you crowded in more donors and the donors feel like they got a good deal. So several people feel they can attribute the same counterfactual impact to themselves ;)
  - miki123211 25d ago
    If you're a charity, you aren't optimizing for max(value_generated) in an immediate way. If your mission is to help children with cancer, you don't want to spend 100% of your funding on chemotherapy and drug development, because that way, you eventually run out of money (donors die and their cards expire, and you aren't spending on marketing to bring in new ones). You may spend some of it on buying a fancy yacht and organizing a ball for the rich, which will bring in 4x as much in donations as you spend on getting it to happen, and that's the money you spend on chemo and new drugs. If you care about as much money being spend on cancer research as possible, that's potentially a better way to make it happen than spending your donations on cancer research. Imagine a donor is willing to give you $1m, but you believe you can get up to $500k in extra donations from strangers on the internet if you do donation matching (it's essentially a free marketing campaign). So you ask them for $500k in hard cash and $500k in matched funds. Even if you overestimate and only get $400k in donations, you're still getting an extra $200k of free money.
    - conformist 24d ago
      Yeah, iterating that a bit further is why paying for political lobbying can be worth it compared to direct donations. However, the less direct your theory of change, the harder to quantify impact and the wider the posterior distribution tends to get. Some of the most impactful things I’ve donated to (imo) have a chance of moving some large scale donations (think Gates) into a marginally more impactful direction.
prirun 25d ago
I read that Internet Archive keeps 2 copies of all their data. Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy, mostly IMO because of incompetent management. They pay their node operators, the guys that actually maintain the hard drive space, $1.35/TB/mo to store data. (However it costs Storj 1.8x that because of erasure coding). They still have way more available capacity going unused, so it's likely they could lower the payout rate even further and have talked about doing that. Internet Archive could buy Storj, probably for not much, keep 1 copy of their archive on the IA custom server setup they have now, keep the other copy on Storj, and free up half of the IA disk space. Storj automagically uploads data to 54 nodes, any 29 of which can reconstruct the original data (54/29 is where the 1.8 expansion factor occurs).
- brokensegue 25d ago
  Isn't storj a crypto thing? I don't think they'd want to be involved. I get the sense they are idealists
  - insom 24d ago
    They are idealists but also like cryptocurrency and decentralization. I recognize that's pretty rare since the late 2010's reputation of various coins and their environmental impact but IA is heavily associated with (and received much money from) FileCoin: https://ffdweb.org/ https://ffdweb.org/ (and I am not saying it's bad, or indeed good, just that the usual expectations of being pro- or anti- cryptocurrency or AI don't easily map to things like the Archive)
- riobard 25d ago
  Maybe they could start a Archive@Home project for volunteers to donate unused disk space for the greater good.
  - schmeichel 24d ago
    I know I'd love to run something like this!
  - 24d ago
motbus3 25d ago
It might be time for archive.org go not be running on http only
zachlatta 25d ago
The AI companies should all make visionary donations to the Internet Archive.
badlibrarian 25d ago
If you use the site, support them. If you are a technical person, offer to help them. But maybe cash, or even the proxy of being able to say they have a large number of cash supporters, isn't really what's needed here? Set up after the lawsuits that nearly wiped out his personal assets, Brewster Kahle's latest foundation shows $743 million in assets. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/991989779 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/991... “We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-arc https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-arc... "Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?" John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead: "We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time." https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m... Depending on when you click his feed, the ongoing downtime is due to DDoS attacks, bad actors, AI scrapers, power problems, or now an inability to source hard drives. https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c
threethirtytwo 24d ago
how: When you start a recurring donation of $25 or more in September, your initial gift will be matched 2:1. Does that occur? Who's doing the matching?
H3l0s_T3k 24d ago
[flagged]
phendrenad2 24d ago
Why would I donate money to keep your servers running, when I get my IP blocked for days when I try to view more than 20 archived pages? What utility are you actually providing me? From my perspective, Internet Archive is already defunct. It no longer exists, just a hollow organization pretending to be Internet Archive remains.
clcaev 24d ago
The 1:2 match scheme is helpful for a foundation to (a) accept large gift and (b) meet 501c3 1/3rd "public support" requirements. To keep favorable charity taxation status, a large donation can only be accepted if there are sufficient small donors who also contribute. It's complex and indirect, but the matching is quite real as a $100 contribution from a small donor enables the charity to accept a corresponding amount from large donor pledges.
- grogers 24d ago
  I was always confused about why charities did this type of matching gifts, it always seemed a bit odd just to trick people to giving right now and not whenever. Interesting that there's a structural reason for it, TIL, thank you
raybb 24d ago
I have been volunteering with the Internet Archive via Open Library for about half a decade now. Sending money is awesome and they're also always looking for volunteers! There are so many projects going on for Open Library and staff has quite a few volunteers but right now especially I think it would be awesome to have a few more experienced folks joining to help (many volunteers are students). Here's just a few things we could use more experienced folks to help on: - Solr performance, it currently gets quite slow under load and there are two read replicas but we think there may be some ways to improve it besides adding more replicas. You can run a full production copy of solr based on the dumps... But the current workflow to do this is kinda broke so I had AI fix it up but we haven't been able to verify if it's a fully working/good solution. - We're doing big redesigns of major parts of the frontend. If your down to help for that Lokesh had many tickets open and guidelines and welcomes PRs. - I'm currently migrating us from web.py to fastapi and could certainly use more experienced help for trickier ones. Anyway, if you're actually willing to help all you gotta do is join our community call tomorrow at 9am PST and share your interests. We'll you on to something you like quickly :) https://docs.openlibrary.org/everyone/community-call.html#community-call https://docs.openlibrary.org/everyone/community-call.html#co...
- b40d-48b2-979e 24d ago
  I'm curious, why a BDFL framework like FastAPI over Litestar or a different, performant language altogether?
  - raybb 24d ago
    Not another language because the performance issues are limited to the code being sync. Anyway, a gradual migration was a must as well. This is the first I hear of Litestar and I think it does seem very values aligned. I fastapi was picked simply because it was already known by the team and had a very thriving ecosystem. That being said, the hard part is getting off the old sync web.py stuff. Once everything is in async land moving to another framework if needed is relatively trivial. Thanks for sharing that though I'll keep an eye on it!
    - 24d ago
0x0000F8 24d ago
The internet archive is the last bastion of hope for any future independent training data, not to mention archived media in all forms somewhat slows down bias introduction inf information and archives freedom of thought/speech to an extent.
niuzeta 24d ago
I'd been donating $5 for a long time and I just bumped it to $25. These posts are great reminders for passive donators like myself.
solarkraft 24d ago
I’m a big fan of the IA and have donated before. I would really appreciate it if they spent more resources on improving the site’s UX and fewer on picking pointless and expensive copyright fights.
mdrzn 24d ago
"Error establishing a database connection" funny.
aeroscissorz1 23d ago
I was not gonna pay, but this quote “Universal access to all human knowledge is within our grasp. Our job is to put the best our world has to offer within the reach of our children.” touched me.

1057 points by sonicrocketman 25d ago

retox 25d ago

[dead]

sonicrocketman 25d ago

Just posting this so others can be reminded to donate the archive (no association by me, just a fan).

totalconfusion 25d ago

Who's paying?

deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
killingtime74 25d ago
I click through to a few links and cannot find who is doing the matching
- Daneel_ 25d ago
  That’s what I want to know before committing too.
colesantiago 25d ago
Let's be honest, almost nobody is donating a significant amount i.e. $100K+ to the Internet Archive that would actually keep them alive. Everyone wants to scrape and extract from them 100% for free.
- j16sdiz 25d ago
  No. The question OP ask was.... who is paying for the matching? The donation got 3x, sure somebody is paying, right? I was planning to donate, and this omission stopped me.
  - losteric 25d ago
    why?? It's extremely common for nonprofits to have anonymous matching donors. Even my local animal shelter.
    - Daneel_ 25d ago
      Then why not just say that in the post? "Our matching donor wishes to remain anonymous, but we thank them for their generosity" Simple.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 25d ago
    Why are you guys getting worked up over this? What's wrong with donors wanting to be anonymous?
    - ssl-3 25d ago
      It's OK for a donor that provides matching funds to wish for, and to be granted, anonymity. It's also OK for primary donors to be suspicious of this for any reason that they choose, including no reason at all. Maybe the matching-funds donor is all peachy and clean. Maybe they're the root of all evil. We don't know. This lack of knowledge doesn't let people make an informed decision, and people are allowed to seek to make informed decisions and to get turned off when that isn't possible. :) (For the record: I'm more motivated to toss a few dollars in the hat when there's a multiplier at play than when there is not. I don't really care who it is that supplies the extra money. My mentality might lead me to a situation wherein my donation to the local orphanage is anonymously multiplied by a nearby orphan crushing facility that turns lost kids into soylent green, but it's a risk that I'm willing to take. Others are free to be as averse or accepting as they wish.)
      - 25d ago
lukeify 25d ago
Truly stunning that they omitted this information.

pm90 25d ago

It was super easy to donate; Im so glad they have a landing page that supports several payment methods and makes it easy to donate. I love the wayback machine, hope everyone pitches in : ).

Cider9986 25d ago

THere's also archive.today who does great user-directed archiving. We don't appreciate this infrastructure some random guy runs enough. It's annoying how often archive.org blocks sites but they both complement each other very well. https://liberapay.com/archiveis/donate https://liberapay.com/archiveis/donate https://coindrop.to/archive https://coindrop.to/archive When finding archive.today's Monero donation address just now, I had to use archive.org because donatemonero.org [1] is down. https://web.archive.org/web/20260526080016/https://donatemonero.org/project/archive-is.html https://web.archive.org/web/20260526080016/https://donatemon...

qingcharles 25d ago
Absolutely deserves a donation too. How it keeps running is beyond me, especially as he/she/they keep adding more paywall bypasses on the backend.
- esskay 25d ago
  It doesnt really deserve anything given they used the site to attack people. See the comment above yours.
  - vachina 25d ago
    I’d gladly join his/her botnet. archive.is is the only archive that acts like an archive.
    - esskay 25d ago
      That would be pretty crappy of you given he was attacking an innocent 3rd party. Morals be damned i guess.
      - DaSHacka 25d ago
        "innocent" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. Does it change the calculus at all if this "innocent" person was trying to dox the operator for nothing more than satisfying a personal whim?

qingcharles 25d ago

Just donated. Appreciate the reminder.

arjie 25d ago

I do like the Internet Archive but I wish I could retrieve large segments from it myself. It has very aggressive 429s. It would be a nice higher donor tier feature. Maybe it’s not possible to do so and retain 501c3 status? Regardless I have had to start performing personal datahoarding. C’est la vie.

eru 25d ago
I wonder if they could sell you access to a bittorrent tracker? Officially it would be independent of the donations, just an extra service they sell?
- queenkjuul 25d ago
  They have torrent downloads for a lot of content, I've downloaded almost a terabyte from them via torrent, they're just not bundled, as in you would need to retrieve each torrent file for each item individually, which might still get you a 429 if you automated it idk. I've never actually got a 429 using a browser though personally, they do throttle aggressively though
  - smolder 25d ago
    Anyone with a lot of data has to carefully apply limits to not get bankrupted by frontier AI people with residential proxies scraping the shit out of everything.
- yreg 25d ago
  Why sell? I thought the idea of donating to them is to make the information available for everyone for free.
  - eru 24d ago
    Bandwidth costs money, and one could sell premium access to fund one's more public minded services.
thechairman12 25d ago

deleted 25d ago

[deleted]

crewman9 25d ago

Yeah, _no_ Shut ClimateGPT down, apologize and then we can talk about donation.

RileyJames 25d ago
What should archive.org apologise for in this regard?
eru 25d ago
Interesting. How is ClimateGPT linked to archive.org, and why do you object to it?
- stonogo 25d ago
  ClimateGPT is built by Erasmus.AI, which says "Built by Erasmus.AI on behalf of the ClimateGPT Foundation, and supported by the Internet Archive Europe,". Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive founder (and board chair), is on the board of Erasmus.AI. It does seem weird to rattle the donation box because hosting costs are going up while shooting money at the prime cause of hosting costs going up.
  - LastTrain 25d ago
    They are independent organizations with separate funding.
    - stonogo 25d ago
      Brewster Kahle is on IA Europe's board as well (with Daniel Erasmus, whose baby is Erasmus.AI). I'm sure they have separate bank accounts, but let's not pretend these organizations are independent. They're all run by the same little club of friends.
    - crewman9 25d ago
      then why did the main IA account post about this https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/117219501245722161 https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11721950124572... and it's darkly funny how HN downvotes this when every single answer on Mastodon is incredibly negative

akudha 25d ago

How do they handle AI slop? If they index AI generated articles, it is just not sustainable, right?

zetanor 25d ago

I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocably leaks your e-mail address: https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email (2009)). What's a lot harder to overlook is that the IA brazenly hosts warez on clearnet and pulls off stunts like the COVID "emergency library". I'm all for ending copyright, but does any of that really need to be linked with the Wayback Machine? Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a unique(ly valuable) source of information and history. It's not my call, but it seems strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism. What happens when some stick-up-the-ass company—whose stuff is probably in hundreds of different collections—decides it really wants a payday?

frenchtoast8 24d ago
How much did IA spend on legal fees, employee time, etc in their defense of the COVID emergency library that most people thought was a lost cause? I need to know where my donation dollars are going.
- addy34 24d ago
  Tax filings are available here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943242767 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943... Rev. Costs(all) Legal ----------------------------- 2019 37 37 0.2 2020 22 20 0.4 2021 30 25 2.0 2022 31 26 1.8 2023 24 33 1.0 2024 27 24 2.2 USD millions. Legal is non-employee costs.
  - nijave 24d ago
    Are there on staff lawyers hiding in payroll or do they contract everything?

foo42 25d ago

Internet Archive feels like an important... well, archive, yet I often worry about the load, financial and potentially political, which is put on it when people use it as a workaround for pay-walls, as is often advocated on HN

mr_mitm 25d ago
That's a different archive
- warpech 25d ago
  Umm, no? The parent means Wayback Machine, which is a service of Internet Archive (both at archive.org). Or am I confused?
  - mr_mitm 25d ago
    The archive that bypasses paywalls is archive.today (or archive.is, archive.ph, ...) which is run by some shady person, not a professional organization like Wayback Machine.

abeyer 25d ago

"Keep running" is interesting phrasing, given that wayback has been serving me nothing but some mix of timeouts, 429 errors, and "Temporarily Offline" messages for weeks.

smolder 25d ago
I've watched whole video series from their archives. What are you doing to get throttled?
- badlibrarian 24d ago
  Which archives? Wayback is different from Archive. Which is different from Archive-It. And the problem with Wayback was power poles being set on fire by homeless people, then SF power in general, then "upgrades," then "bad actors," then hot weather causing the machines to slow down because they don't have air conditioning, evil AI companies, and now seems to be the fact that an organization backed by someone with nearly a billion dollars, founded 30 years ago, cannot source hard drives. https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c Fundraising drive coordinated with their loudest employee saying something else, because... of course.
  - smolder 24d ago
    Archive.org. I watched the whole of Norm Macdonalds "cancelled" (in the "cancel culture" sense) show/podcast on there. Oddly, he died a few days after I finished it.
    - badlibrarian 24d ago
      Different site, different backend, different problems. GP was talking about wayback.archive.org, which threw a 429 error just now when I verified the URL.

TekMol 25d ago

I still don't get how copying copyrighted content to your own website and then asking for donations can be a legal business model. Nor how it can be morally justified. I get that many people like such an archive to be around for consumption. Me too. But, keeping emotions aside, I can't find a justification to violate the rights of creators. I'm sure many people here will have the knee-jerk reaction to immediately downvote this question. But I know there are also thoughtful people on HN. If some of you have ideas about the legal and moral justification for archive.org's actions, I would like to hear them.

neilwilson 25d ago
Copyright is a legal grant from the public to the individual. Perhaps it is time to recognise that this literal Mickey Mouse law needs to be rebalanced more in favour of the public than the monopolist, as that creates better societal outcomes.
spider-mario 25d ago
“your own website and then asking for donations […] business model” make it sound as if it’s for profit, which it isn’t.
pjc50 25d ago
The legal justification is that it's a library. This does actually seem to work for them in general, although they badly overstepped with books and lost in court. Any creator-based outrage should be directed first and foremost at the for-profit violations by AI companies, rather than the small volunteer service which is keeping history up. Ultimately there is no archiving without piracy. The alternative is for the web to exist in an eternal present where everything vanishes the moment some business decides it's not worth it or conflicts with current corporate values.
hk__2 25d ago
It’s a non-profit that archives publicly-accessible content. If it were a for-profit (Google snippets, LLMs) I’d understand your question, but since it doesn’t profit from it I don’t see the issue.
25d ago

klamann 25d ago

Does the Internet Archive have any options to donate from the EU so I can get a donation receipt from a EU based non-profit? I know there is the "Internet Archive Europe", but that seems to be a Wikimedia like thing, i.e. they don't collect funds for the IA but for whatever it is they are doing here (which is not archiving websites for some reason?).

ThePowerOfFuet 25d ago
Send EUR via SEPA transfer to GB74RBOS16107510000470. (Yes, the page only mentions wire transfer, but SEPA transfers work too, are faster, and cost everyone less.) Source: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-wire-transfer/ https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-wire-transfer/
- eis 25d ago
  Making a wire transfer is easy, but can it be deducted from taxes? That's the tricky part.
  - 47282847 25d ago
    No it can’t. Even across Europe it is not a given that the local tax authorities will easily accept the receipt. Charity law is national.
- klamann 25d ago
  there would still be fees for a wire transfer from a EU bank to this bank in the US, right? And I wouldn't get a donation receipt that would be accepted by the tax man over here anyway.
  - edelbitter 25d ago
    RBOS is short for Royal Bank of Scotland. When accepting SEPA credit transfer (though they are not legally mandated to offer the instant execution variant), I don't think there is even a mechanism to sneak in extra fees, beyond what the sending institute already billed (typically: 0.00€).

theletterf 25d ago

Be careful: paying with Google Pay is extremely easy and the default setting is monthly recurrence. If you're not logged in, the only way to cancel (as far as I know) is by sending an email, which is incredibly precarious.

John7878781 25d ago
in those situations, especially if the business is unresponsive, i just keep charging back until they stop. if i can subscribe easily, i should be able to cancel just as easily :)
- theletterf 25d ago
  Well, you can't if you paid using a debit card, like I did. Silly me.
  - Melatonic 25d ago
    You often still can actually. Call your bank
    - theletterf 25d ago
      Just did. Not possible in Spain.
      - embedding-shape 25d ago
        Which bank? My main bank (I'm also in Spain) is BBVA which is able to do charge backs with my debit cards as well. Was possible with Banc Sabadell I used to have as well, really strange to hear there is a bank that doesn't support that today with debit cards.
  - eis 25d ago
    Debit cards can do chargebacks just as credit cards can do. That's a feature of Visa and Mastercard (and others). If your bank refuses, complain to the card network. Oh and consider changing banks, that's really unacceptable in 2026 and shows an anti customer stance.

spiderfarmer 25d ago

They should ask the AI scraping companies for donations.

smolder 25d ago
They probably have, hence the matching thing.

do_it_for_free 25d ago

They have some positions posted on their job board. I would do this for free. They should adopt a volunteer workforce like the Redcross Code4Good Volunteer Enterprise Web Services team. Senior Datacenter Network Infrastructure Engineer Full Time San Francisco, CA, US 30+ days ago Requisition ID: XXXX Salary Range: $140,000.00 To $200,000.00 Annually

aurareturn 25d ago
Pick 2 out of 3 for these kinds of volunteer work: - Capable - Reliable - Free You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free?
- egorfine 25d ago
  > You going to be on call at 3am to bring services back up doing it for free? Yes. For the Internet Archive I totally would. As responsible as I do my main job.
  - aurareturn 25d ago
    You should definitely apply and sign a contract. They should charge you money if you don't show up at 3am in an outage. All it takes is one emergency and the volunteer person doesn't show up for the non profit to want to hire a full time person. This event has likely already occurred at Archive.
    - egorfine 25d ago
      This is a genuine consideration.
  - insom 24d ago
    The work required to keep IA infrastructure operating is full time: these are full-time positions. IIRC they were at ~70 racks of stuff just in the California locations and apart from on-call and emergency response there's growth to keep up with, future planning etc. There's no reasonable world where this is a few hour's per week volunteering like your local boat club. It's a Top 200 website, around the size of the Guardian newspaper -- never mind that Wayback is only a small portion of what they do. (Book scanning, inter-library loans, paid services for other GLAM organizations and governments etc.)

xyst 25d ago

Why can’t these wealthy donors funding the "match" just pay a lump sum? Why make IA and other non profits jump through hoops to get the full amount?

loeg 25d ago
(They do. The "matching" is just a fundraising gimmick; essentially a lie.)

esskay 25d ago

I'm quite surprised they havent also adopted a high paying sponsorship model. If they had something and large hosting providers were pressured into sponsoring them by customers they'd have no funding issues. Also why arent they on opencollective? Surely thats a no brainer!

tossandthrow 25d ago

2:1 by who? That is not written. These types of schemes ring very poorly in my head for charity. If someone has the ability to give 2$ for every 1$ I give, why are they only giving on contingence? Just give the money!

conformist 25d ago
Value judgment aside: Probably because it works well empirically. If you’re a larger scale donor and you’re interested in maximising impact, you may agree to a matching program type setup to crowd in more donors. Also you feel smart because you crowded in more donors and the donors feel like they got a good deal. So several people feel they can attribute the same counterfactual impact to themselves ;)
- miki123211 25d ago
  If you're a charity, you aren't optimizing for max(value_generated) in an immediate way. If your mission is to help children with cancer, you don't want to spend 100% of your funding on chemotherapy and drug development, because that way, you eventually run out of money (donors die and their cards expire, and you aren't spending on marketing to bring in new ones). You may spend some of it on buying a fancy yacht and organizing a ball for the rich, which will bring in 4x as much in donations as you spend on getting it to happen, and that's the money you spend on chemo and new drugs. If you care about as much money being spend on cancer research as possible, that's potentially a better way to make it happen than spending your donations on cancer research. Imagine a donor is willing to give you $1m, but you believe you can get up to $500k in extra donations from strangers on the internet if you do donation matching (it's essentially a free marketing campaign). So you ask them for $500k in hard cash and $500k in matched funds. Even if you overestimate and only get $400k in donations, you're still getting an extra $200k of free money.
  - conformist 24d ago
    Yeah, iterating that a bit further is why paying for political lobbying can be worth it compared to direct donations. However, the less direct your theory of change, the harder to quantify impact and the wider the posterior distribution tends to get. Some of the most impactful things I’ve donated to (imo) have a chance of moving some large scale donations (think Gates) into a marginally more impactful direction.

prirun 25d ago

I read that Internet Archive keeps 2 copies of all their data. Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy, mostly IMO because of incompetent management. They pay their node operators, the guys that actually maintain the hard drive space, $1.35/TB/mo to store data. (However it costs Storj 1.8x that because of erasure coding). They still have way more available capacity going unused, so it's likely they could lower the payout rate even further and have talked about doing that. Internet Archive could buy Storj, probably for not much, keep 1 copy of their archive on the IA custom server setup they have now, keep the other copy on Storj, and free up half of the IA disk space. Storj automagically uploads data to 54 nodes, any 29 of which can reconstruct the original data (54/29 is where the 1.8 expansion factor occurs).

brokensegue 25d ago
Isn't storj a crypto thing? I don't think they'd want to be involved. I get the sense they are idealists
- insom 24d ago
  They are idealists but also like cryptocurrency and decentralization. I recognize that's pretty rare since the late 2010's reputation of various coins and their environmental impact but IA is heavily associated with (and received much money from) FileCoin: https://ffdweb.org/ https://ffdweb.org/ (and I am not saying it's bad, or indeed good, just that the usual expectations of being pro- or anti- cryptocurrency or AI don't easily map to things like the Archive)
riobard 25d ago
Maybe they could start a Archive@Home project for volunteers to donate unused disk space for the greater good.
- schmeichel 24d ago
  I know I'd love to run something like this!
- 24d ago

motbus3 25d ago

It might be time for archive.org go not be running on http only

zachlatta 25d ago

The AI companies should all make visionary donations to the Internet Archive.

badlibrarian 25d ago

If you use the site, support them. If you are a technical person, offer to help them. But maybe cash, or even the proxy of being able to say they have a large number of cash supporters, isn't really what's needed here? Set up after the lawsuits that nearly wiped out his personal assets, Brewster Kahle's latest foundation shows $743 million in assets. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/991989779 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/991... “We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-arc https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-arc... "Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?" John Gonzalez, Internet Archive infrastructure lead: "We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time." https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m... Depending on when you click his feed, the ongoing downtime is due to DDoS attacks, bad actors, AI scrapers, power problems, or now an inability to source hard drives. https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c https://bsky.app/profile/textfiles.com/post/3musdwx6kqk2c

threethirtytwo 24d ago

how: When you start a recurring donation of $25 or more in September, your initial gift will be matched 2:1. Does that occur? Who's doing the matching?

H3l0s_T3k 24d ago

[flagged]

phendrenad2 24d ago

Why would I donate money to keep your servers running, when I get my IP blocked for days when I try to view more than 20 archived pages? What utility are you actually providing me? From my perspective, Internet Archive is already defunct. It no longer exists, just a hollow organization pretending to be Internet Archive remains.

clcaev 24d ago

The 1:2 match scheme is helpful for a foundation to (a) accept large gift and (b) meet 501c3 1/3rd "public support" requirements. To keep favorable charity taxation status, a large donation can only be accepted if there are sufficient small donors who also contribute. It's complex and indirect, but the matching is quite real as a $100 contribution from a small donor enables the charity to accept a corresponding amount from large donor pledges.

grogers 24d ago
I was always confused about why charities did this type of matching gifts, it always seemed a bit odd just to trick people to giving right now and not whenever. Interesting that there's a structural reason for it, TIL, thank you

raybb 24d ago

I have been volunteering with the Internet Archive via Open Library for about half a decade now. Sending money is awesome and they're also always looking for volunteers! There are so many projects going on for Open Library and staff has quite a few volunteers but right now especially I think it would be awesome to have a few more experienced folks joining to help (many volunteers are students). Here's just a few things we could use more experienced folks to help on: - Solr performance, it currently gets quite slow under load and there are two read replicas but we think there may be some ways to improve it besides adding more replicas. You can run a full production copy of solr based on the dumps... But the current workflow to do this is kinda broke so I had AI fix it up but we haven't been able to verify if it's a fully working/good solution. - We're doing big redesigns of major parts of the frontend. If your down to help for that Lokesh had many tickets open and guidelines and welcomes PRs. - I'm currently migrating us from web.py to fastapi and could certainly use more experienced help for trickier ones. Anyway, if you're actually willing to help all you gotta do is join our community call tomorrow at 9am PST and share your interests. We'll you on to something you like quickly :) https://docs.openlibrary.org/everyone/community-call.html#community-call https://docs.openlibrary.org/everyone/community-call.html#co...

b40d-48b2-979e 24d ago
I'm curious, why a BDFL framework like FastAPI over Litestar or a different, performant language altogether?
- raybb 24d ago
  Not another language because the performance issues are limited to the code being sync. Anyway, a gradual migration was a must as well. This is the first I hear of Litestar and I think it does seem very values aligned. I fastapi was picked simply because it was already known by the team and had a very thriving ecosystem. That being said, the hard part is getting off the old sync web.py stuff. Once everything is in async land moving to another framework if needed is relatively trivial. Thanks for sharing that though I'll keep an eye on it!
  - 24d ago

0x0000F8 24d ago

The internet archive is the last bastion of hope for any future independent training data, not to mention archived media in all forms somewhat slows down bias introduction inf information and archives freedom of thought/speech to an extent.

niuzeta 24d ago

I'd been donating $5 for a long time and I just bumped it to $25. These posts are great reminders for passive donators like myself.

solarkraft 24d ago

I’m a big fan of the IA and have donated before. I would really appreciate it if they spent more resources on improving the site’s UX and fewer on picking pointless and expensive copyright fights.

mdrzn 24d ago

"Error establishing a database connection" funny.

aeroscissorz1 23d ago

I was not gonna pay, but this quote “Universal access to all human knowledge is within our grasp. Our job is to put the best our world has to offer within the reach of our children.” touched me.