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Comment by justin_ | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to submit an article about this but couldn't find anything either.

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.

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Hm that's interesting, I imagine the internet archive has lots of seedboxes/CDNs/datacenters distributed globally. I have no idea how much information the internet archive is currently backing up though, but its growing at an increasing rate.

I would love to see a write up of how their infrastructure works though

My understanding is all of their digital content is stored and served from their location in SF, although it would be awesome if they started geographically distributing their storage nodes.

http://archive.org/web/petabox.php

Note this is an extremely old webpage.

Although, as a sibling comment points out, that article is very old, I can attest to its continuing general accuracy, having interviewed there last year.

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.

There's been at least a partial copy in Alexandria and Amsterdam for a long time, and they opened a full replica in Canada last year. At least I think the Canada one is done, can't find a blog post saying it was finished. https://blog.archive.org/2016/12/03/faqs-about-the-internet-...

Was not aware; this is excellent news!

Do you think it's built on top of PeerTube Social or is it something completely different?

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