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Why would I expect someone to host/write it for free?

When were obits ever free? The family typically paid to run an obit in the paper. I can't imagine why it would be any different. After that, people had to pay $0.25 to $2.00 for the paper to see them.

Newspapers used to cost a lot less than $0.25 and the ones still printed today tend to cost more than $2.

Isn't that just inflation?

what's your point?

Yeah, around the same time a decent wage used to be $20k.

Libraries typically keep archives of newspapers accessible for free. I imagine the long record of obituaries in this archive would be invaluable for certain types of research.

I’m somewhat surprised a WikiObituary doesn’t exist yet, with them collectively written and crowdsourced prior to death and licensed permissively. Wikipedia + ChatGPT to do the heavy lifting perhaps for the rough cut, and then clean it up.

Might try to find some time to spike a GPT or something and see what happens.

If you're old enough Facebook, becomes this.

okay, I might roll in my grave if an obit is published in fb

Adding that to my will:

- under zero circumstances will you publish any posthumous docs/writings/obituaries to Meta, Facebook, or anything bearing Zuckerberg’s name

- all to be made available publicly, any fees associated to be paid out of estate

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