I am not familiar with this new dweb subdomain, what is unique about it?
Archive has actually lost some of the archives I stored on it, which is weird, because I ran multitude of backups on it a few years back when the site got taken offline
My understanding is that this loads content from various protocols (listed at the top of the page), many of which support replicating data in a decentralized way. As far as I know, there's no blockchain involved in anything here yet.
If you browse to the Community Video section and choose a video, you can see peer information as though downloading through WebTorrent. If I disable WebTorrent and look at a video, I don't see the peer information and it seems to fall back to HTTP. Pretty cool! It looks like almost everything is only seeded by the Internet Archive right now, but hopefully they want to encourage more people to participate.
I would love to see a write up of how their infrastructure works though
Although I didn't get a look at their financials, my overall impression is that they can't afford anything as extravagant as geographic distribution, absent a huge corporate sponsor or two.
Even a modest increase in donation revenue would be unlikely to make a difference, as the other impression I had was that spending in that area was far from a priority, especially compared with data acquisition/conversion projects.
I think it's great that the IA is attempting to be a broad, general-interest digital library, since nobody else is doing that.
However, I also wish for a separate archive focused specifically on The Web. Besides not being subject to distractions or competing interests, I speculate that it would be more attractive for web-dependent companies, such as Google or CDNs, to donate to.
Who currently controls the domain? One of the ways stuff can be lost is if a new domain owner fiddles with robots.txt. (The Archive has recently changed their policy about that)
We have also seen an upsurge of the use of robots.txt files to remove entire domains from search engines when they transition from a live web site into a parked domain, which has historically also removed the entire domain from view in the Wayback Machine.
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
Can a script check robots.txt periodically for changes and if changes are detected, then download the content from Wayback Machine before it becomes inaccessible?
Additionally, can a script check the domain registration for an anticipated expiration date, or perhaps monitor domainname "drop lists"?