Archive.is owner on “continuity of his project”

As someone who managed to get more or less donation campaigns in the past, here are my 2 cents.

There's a huge difference between "please donate to our project" and "it costs us $X/month to run it, we have Y users and managed to collect $Z so far, please donate".

The first one will get you about $1 per 10K-1M users. The second one will get your goal fulfilled, as long as you are reasonable, and have enough users. All it takes is a noticeable message and a way to update it automatically based on the money received.

Depending on the format of the archives (hopefully WARC), the owner could hand the entire archive over to the Internet Archive or Archive Team for ingestion by Wayback Machine.

If the concern is perpetual access to archived content but under your terms, that is where the cost comes in. Somebody somewhere is paying for power, cooling, connectivity, and disks. The Internet Archive estimates it costs them $2/GB to host data uploaded in perpetuity. Please consider donating if you're uploading content for permanent archival and/or deriving value from hosted content.

nothing is permanent in life. heaps of torrents i want have 0 seeders.

ipfs's economically incentivised hosting layer (filecoin) offers storage in monthly increments, not perpetual.

An image of a Web asset is useful for archival purposes and may be indexed using text recognition ML.

Yes, the site owner's response seems excessively didactic when a system of mirrors would solve the problem.

> This is a very fair answer, and all "permalinks" are lies

Cool URIs don't change: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

You can believe that cool URIs don't change or you could go the IPFS route. Similar to the way torrents have a 'health' score of plenty of seeders, and IPFS resources could live as long as people want that resource to exist (Not sure if that situation is baked into IPFS though).

Also: have you looked into Filecoin?[0]

[0] https://filecoin.io/

For reference: the spat is that Cloudflare DNS does not leak geographic information of the queryer through EDNS, and the archive.is fellow is requiring geographic information to provide valid DNS lookups. So he intentionally sends back bad results when it is 1.1.1.1 querying his nameservers.

I love the site, but his stance on this doesn't really make sense to me, and it's a shame that millions and millions of people use 1.1.1.1 daily and archive.is is the one website that doesn't work for those people.

Cloudflare also often blocks no-JS users.

All-around a huge accessibility impediment.

I lost faith in Cloudflare when they switched from being a neutral infrastructure service to yet another politically-motivated big tech company. In their blog post around the ban of 8chan (https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/), they acknowledged that they didn't know if 8chan broke any laws but they nevertheless decided to pass personal judgment based on a vague notion that 8chan "inspired" a shooting. That's quite an unprincipled way to operate a fundamental network utility that backs 10% of the Fortune 1000 and 20% of the top 10000 websites.

Here's his quote on instagram archiving problems:

"There is no Instagram content which don’t need to login.

If you can access the page without login, it is sort of “promo preview“, after few pages accessed this way, they add your IP into “promo is over“ list and will redirect to /login on every future request.

I just have not enough fresh IPs to abuse this mechanism."

https://blog.archive.today/post/659927354404192256/instagram...

This is kind of an antithesis to his message in the post; that nothing is actually permanent, and while many people are concerned about continuity of service, ultimately perfect continuity is impossible, whether that's due to the organization running out of money, bad backup practices and a fire, global warming wiping Ashburn Virginia off the map, or the end of the human civilization by some other means.

I've helped with a couple risk registers at tech companies. Two things I've never seen appear in a risk register: The company runs out of money. Human society is wiped out. I've been laughed at once for bringing up variations on these. They're out of scope; risks stop being a threat when there's no one left to care about them.

I think the goal of keeping an internet-scale level of data accessible and searchable, for longer than one lifetime, is an impossible task. Maybe Archive.org/Archive.is can pull it off; I doubt it. Its an insane amount of data. Most of it is totally pointless, but its really difficult to pick-apart what's useful and what's useless, so you have to keep as much as possible without bias. All of that is on hard disks which violently spin around at 8 meters per second, accessed by software which we all know breaks every day but are too afraid to admit it, over a network of other computers with all the same flaws, distributed globally, yet can be significantly disrupted by one roadside construction worker and a jackhammer.

The internet didn't increase the lifetime of data; it decreased it. Sure, we have far more of it at our fingertips than any other point in history, but that's not lifetime; that's just volume. And that volume has desensitized us; its fundamentally impacting our innate biological memory capacity, and the social structures we form around memory. We know the Library of Alexandria existed because people wrote about it; the pages laid for thousands of years; its memory passed verbally from person to person.

If all computers stopped functioning tomorrow, not even disappear, they're still there, they just don't work: Would the memory of Stranger Things still be known in two thousand years? I doubt it, but: if the only thing which offers us a satisfying "Yes" is "we keep the computers running, accessible, indexable, searchable"; that seems, at the very least, given the extreme challenges we as a species will be facing over the next century, beyond the scope of human possibility

I think it’s one of those things modern parents are going to have to understand about their brave new world, and teach their modern children. Like look both ways before crossing the street, remember that everything you write on the Internet is permanent, so think before you write, or if you don’t want to do that then at least write it under a pseudonym.

> There is an interesting conundrum here, when we post to the internet do we also consent to having that information saved for all eternity?

I'm not sure about consent, but presume it will be 'stuck' and un-removeable from the net once it's out there. (So be careful what you disseminate). Some people even go out of their way to make sure certain content will never be forgotten from the web.

Yes. I think people need to understand that anything on the internet is by default, there forever. Post something privately or behind a password if you don't want everyone seeing it.

What blissful times we lived in before the daily drumbeat of “Accomplished young professional discovered to have said offensive things on the internet when they were a dumb teenager, reputation tarred and feathered for the rest of their life.”

If we're talking that long of a timescale, how long does your typical book these days actually last? I'm no expert, but it makes me wonder how long consumer paper actually lasts. Reasonable(?) search result below.

https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-it-take-for-paper-to-dec...

Register your own domain and use that for email. Then you can move that domain's email service to different providers.

I use Gmail right now, but I could move my domain's email to Fastmail or another provider without _too_ much work.

Of course, it's also a good idea to back up your email archives too, since that _can_ go away with the loss of a provider's service.

Yes it has been around, but it's quite jarring to see anyone actually use it.

That's my main use and sometimes feel bad about it, since I just want to see the content and not archive some mediocre article for “posterity”.

According to my understanding: archive.today/archive.is are the main domains the service is known under, others are mirrors selected depending on country you are located in (because of domain bans in some countries).

Site owner said once archive.today is the domain to use when linking because it will automatically redirect to the correct one.

He's mentioned this before. He has multiple domains because they can go down sometimes.