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Comment by tegiddrone | Hacker News Reader

Nice. How to handle dead links? A growing problem with hyperlinking across sites in general.

An idea: when you take a quote, send the webpage through archivebox.io and pin the resulting artifacts to IPFS... or other repository the author can maintain. Key feature: the quoting author maintains the copy of the document they are quoting. The embedded "quote" fixture on the page will always point to the original URL and citation date alongside the author's "copy" of the page if it happens to die or change.

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In practice: images.

It's not best-practices or accessible but works across the board, from academic PDFs to tweets. There's also more options for annotation (color highlighting, sarcastic emoji etc) in an image.

IPFS was designed to solve this problem of the impermanence of the current web.

This article kind of says it all: "The InterPlanetary File System Wants to Create a Permanent Web"—https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/78xgaq/the-interplanetary...

But in practice what that means is that if you hold a reference to some page in your article you can/should keep it alive by seeding it.

Yes!

It would be lovely if you could fork a webpage the same way you do to a git repo.

For those who likes this idea I think this a feature of one alternative browser (Maybe the Beaker browser? I could fibd this easily but there might be more: https://docs.beakerbrowser.com/beginner/hosting-hyperdrives)

For anyone curious, Beaker is a browser that can download websites over the Hypercore protocol, which is similar to Bittorrent. Bittorrent is just a way to download files, so why not HTML and images? This is cool because anyone can seed a site to keep it up forever. To fork a site, you just download it and rehost it yourself after making whatever changes you want.

Note that Hypercore is different from Bittorrent in that you can actually update your site after you originally create it, although older versions are always available.

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