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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

https://web.archive.org/web/20210722231119/https://games.gre...

Edit: For anyone seeing this much later in time, the website got flooded when it hit the Hacker News main page. I grabbed the archive mirror of it from earlier today.

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Since this is a frequent occurrence, wouldn’t it be neat if we could do this kind of “archive interesting article” thing using IPFS? Maybe even do it automatically when submitting it to HN such that it could tell HN itself to grab a copy?

> Since this is a frequent occurrence, wouldn’t it be neat if we could do this kind of “archive interesting article” thing using IPFS? Maybe even do it automatically when submitting it to HN such that it could tell HN itself to grab a copy?

Saving things to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive is a far superior solution than IPFS. IIRC, IPFS only keeps things as long as they're popular, which has famously resulted in things like most NFTs pointing to dead links.

With IPFS this can be avoided by using IPFS pinning. It can be done on any node but usually the use of an IPFS pinning service from providers such as Pinata and/or Infura makes the most sense.

It’s the best of both worlds - IPFS will still do it’s decentralized thing but with a pinning service even when individual IPFS nodes do garbage collection or otherwise expire an object locally they can always go fetch it from the persistent copy stored with the pining service.

If my understanding is correct, IPFS provides a way to only store files. Wayback Machine archives entire webpages, along with any CSS or JS (?) included. So building a webpage archival service over IPFS needs significantly more development effort.

You're absolutely correct. I wasn't commenting on the appropriateness or suitability using IPFS for the purpose of archiving webpages. I was replying to parent that there is an IPFS solution for the expired objects/dead links issue.

IIRC, wayback machine has a pretty wicked flaw in that if a domain adds a restrictive robots.txt at some point (say, a domain changes hands), then all prior archives for that domain are retroactively taken offline. Not a problem for archiving things just to keep them online under heavy load, but it's a big problem for future use.

I'd prefer something like archive.is for longer-term storage.

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