Ask HN: Where would you publish content that should outlive you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where would you publish content that should outlive you?

50 pointssssilver56 comments

I would love for my great grandchildren to be able to read the things I write today, and see the photos I’ve taken.

Where should I publish them?

Dedicated hosting and domain are a missed payment away from being purged.

So is iCloud.

Facebook and Tumblr are a bankruptcy away to join Geocities and MySpace.

Own physical bedroom server requires maintenance which can’t be done when you’re dead.

The average dead person’s content isn’t easy to monetize.

Buy a lifetime sdf.org membership for $36 and publish everything there is the best I can come up with. But that’s predicated on trust.

How would you solve this?

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Well, it might get super expensive to print it all if you write a lot. The only trustworthy way I have felt 100% safe with is if I type something like a blog post I would want to leave for my son, I just print it out after I have published it and then sew it into a journal that I have started specifically for him. I also sometimes handwrite things like little notes of things he says that I want to keep while I'm living and leave for him to read about and remember the things that made him so precious to me. Sometimes it's a lot of work to put it all together, especially if I just collect the notes, posts and letters and then need to sew or add them some other way to my book. I just cannot bring myself to trust any company knowing what I do about the lengths they go to in order to trick you into paying for things you don't need or things you forgot you signed up for and how unrepentant they are about it. Not to mention all the other problems you mentioned yourself! I'm going to try to remember to come back here and check in on the answers later because I would love to get some advice here as well.

Start an ideology or religion, and make your body of work its sacred text. I think that is your best bet. Even if it dies out, there's a good chance it will be preserved and studied academically.

Either that or write something really good, so people want to read it, so they will keep paying for it to be published over and over again.

I think the first option is actually a lot easier.

this; historically, human minds organized in societies have themselves been the best archivists

we've been able to store information even before being able to write things down! and the methods of recalling the information keep themselves up to date, no need to maintain esoteric codecs

contrast to other species' instincts/learned behaviors, personally i think the ability to only remember the relevant/interesting parts is a feature, not a bug

How would you solve this?

This may not be the answer you want but I am skeptical of any website being around for very long. I would get something that can control a chipping and etching tool capable of carving designs and words into extremely hard rock, then find caves that go deep into mountains that are at a high altitude to leave behind whatever was on my mind. The reason I would go for high altitude is plate subduction or ocean level sea rise could submerge some caves at or near sea level. I would avoid soft rock caves and instead try to find very hard rock and mountains that contain massive solid slabs of rock vs. layers of different elements that could easily shatter on impact from asteroids. Some may consider this graffiti however explorers in the distant future may find it interesting. Just like parity data I would repeat my carvings in many caves as some will be destroyed. I would then make videos and pictures of my etchings and upload them to the websites and archives that may be around for a couple decades. This is probably just me, but I would never pay a site to keep something around. Businesses fold every day that were pinky-promised to be around for lifetimes.

Print ~10 copies on paper as a book with archive quality paper.

If you are 25 today (2024) you might have adult children in 25 years time; adult grandchildren in another 25 years and great grandchildren 10 years after that (in 2084).

The internet, URL's and websites will be very different by then. Think about the world 60 years ago (1964). This was around the time that 7400 series TTL integrated circuits were released.

How much of your early digital history are still readable today? You might have a box full of 3.5 inch floppy discs but can you still read them.

In short, unless you have a string family history of digital archivists I would only trust paper.

Just make sure to use acid-free paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper

The ability to read digital data in the future is a very good point.

I recently wanted to retrieve my PhD (2000). It was on a disquette, I found the correct reader and had high hopes to connecting it to a contemporary PC.

The thing is that I could not find the disquette anymore, despite being sure it is "there"

My practice for each new generation of device is to copy everything I am interested in to a newer technology while I still have a device that can read the old media.

I have been mostly successful in capturing the files but I have a bunch that are in a format that I no longer have software to read.

I lot is in folders with at least a year in their names but otherwise unprocessed. Lots of duplication. No effective way to find things I might have lost.

I encrypted some stuff but lost track of the keys and the software to decrypt so that data is now lost.

For blog there is posthaven ( https://www.posthaven.com/pledge ) but IMO `<username>.github.io` _is_ your best bet. The DNS will expire if no one pays, so IMO custom DNS is a point of _certain_ failure when we're talking longevity. The catch is that (a) you depend on Microsoft to _never_ sunset github, there's no such pledge and (b) the amount of content you can create in terms of kb is ofc, limited - it's a free service after all.

For large volume data files (e.g. podcasts, videos, etc.) the internet archive works for me (https://archive.org/).

An old YC blog platform Posthaven [0] does this.

If you pay $5/month for 1 year, your posts will be archived forever.

> If we can't charge your card, your site goes into read only mode. Even if something catastrophic happens, your content will remain online.

[0] https://posthaven.com/pricing

Erm, thats Posthaven Inc. to you and me. I.e. a private company. They could change their terms, they could go out of business, they could be bought by Google who would proceed to kill off the service etc etc

The only correct answer to the question is (a) legal deposit with a national library (many take e-deposits these days, so you might not have to print it) or (b) print it on good paper or write it on a good cd and hope for the best

There is of course the silent other half of your question … does anyone really care about your accumulated life history that much ? sure your immediate family might, for a while, but one the bereavement period is over ?

Answers so far are scattered. I'd suggest thinking back generally:

If the problem had been stated as "publish content that lives forever", then we would need to look at ideas with eternity as the purpose. archive.org, bitcoin embedding, at least semi-successful for-profit publication as a book, Long Now - that kind of thing.

But the poster asked for "my great grandchildren". In this case (1) this is short term, (2) this is aimed at an extremely specific set of target people, (3) there is already a structure in place: the family. It can be something as simple as "publish photos and writings as periodical PDFs and distribute and entrust to current family members." If there are not enough current family members for redundancy, then include some family friends. With a notice in each volume that you want these volumes to be communicated to your great grandchildren. Let each one worry about hosting or storage. If they loose theirs, they can easily rebuild their stash from the others. If none of them cares to, that's an answer too, but you can fix that by hiring and paying a trustee to maintain sets in 2-3 of the digital platforms mentioned elsewhere (perhaps including archive.org).

I think the relevant question is "What content would you publish that would be important enough to be retrieved after it outlives you?"

If you publish any content it ends up on several storage devices somewhere along the way, hosting server hdd, ram in routers, switches, etc. We know we can retrieve erased data from hdd's today even if it's been overwritten once or twice. The chances are in the future we'll get even better at that and we'll be able to retrieve an arbitrary cycles of overwritten data.

So the question won't be will that data exist in the future as much as will it be worth anyone's time to look it up, even with a near zero look up time.

I think that's a much harder thing to try to accomplish today so that people care about what you had to say in a few generations.

For example we could look up the DNA sequence of anyone who was ever been buried in a grave that is still around today, how many of their grand grand kids actually do? And what more accurate and interesting fact about a random person is there to know than that?

So unless you invent something notable or make a meaningful contribution, I doubt anyone would care enough to see what you had to say.

Storage is not your problem, content is.

I think the ideal solution to this is hash-based addressing, e.g. a URL that's something like "hash://d480f3e...". Your browser would then use whatever backend service it wants to find and serve the content with that hash.

This is kind of similar to BitTorrent or Filecoin, but the problem with them is that they're tied to the distribution medium. What you'd really want is something that can change with the times and isn't tied to any single backend.

How to incentivize people to continue hosting the content is another problem, but I predict that it shouldn't be too hard because of the constant falling cost of storage.

archive.org, assuming their legal troubles don't take them down. Upload it to there, and ta-da! Body of work. If text, collect it into a book and upload it to LibGen or something also - plenty of shadow sites mirror it. (Yes, it'll be harder to charge for it, but it will probably live on.)

Self-publish a book, and get a library to add the book to their collection.

Libraries will not take self published books very often - I know because I asked them. If they do take it this year, it may well be purged next year. Over the lsat ten years, every library in Australia has had a massive purge.

Hacker News and GitHub. Your contributions to these platforms are syndicated in datasets like The Pile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pile_%28dataset%29 Stay away from platforms like Reddit that gatekeep your data to extract rents.

This is smart. If you're contributing to opensource Github, there's a high likeli hood it gets into one of these datasets and maybe training data for an LLM.

Physical outputs like photo albums and notebooks or documents. Then provide a digital copy as well, physically. Keep the formats as simple as possible, plain text, and video/photo formats that are universal, also document what the formats are for each category of content.

I don't think there's any online digital method that can be guaranteed. Also, this may be hard to accept, unless you led an extraordinary life (I'm talking about your name being known by like 1000 actual humans for something specific, social media doesn't count), a generation or two later the media is most likely to be lost. Fires, storms, random thumb drives getting thrown out, etc. Think of how often you look back at content about your grandparents, for me its like once a year I'll look at the compiled genealogy a family member put together.

I was in a similar discussion some 10y ago. After a few rounds, we concluded that for a really good reliability you could do the following:

- no service is expected to last long enough or to keep your data safe,

- a physical medium is the way to go,

- create 3 backups stored in different location,

- use a different brand for each backup,

- every 10y review the backups: check the data degradation, rebackup on a new medium if the current one is getting phased away, reencode the content if the format is becoming obsolete & hard to open. [IMO, this is the key point]

Getting the old works of a predecessor on a physical medium is a really good feeling (I know how I felt when I'd discover the old notebooks from my father, uncle, etc.). Based on my experience and Internet, CD-R seems to be a good choice if the data volume allows. But it's getting slowly phased away. (fun fact: a few months ago I found the first CD I burnt -- works flawlessly (although, no checksums checked) after 25y)

For just hosting something as long as possible I would highlight two options stolen blatantly from previous threads:

If you can throw enough money at the problem and are in the US, set up a trust to host your content for as long as the funds last.

If not you could bet on The Internet Archive to outlive you (and maybe donate to them).

But I think the bigger issue than hosting is discoverability. How will your great grandchildren find your content even if it was still available?

To cover both issues the best bet is to focus on somehow convincing your offspring on keeping your content and memory alive in what ever way they see fit, enough so that they pass it on. I have no ideas for exact details here, maybe someone else does?

The trust is the only truly perpetual answer so far.

I'd use Familysearch Memories. There are limitations on what you can upload (15mb per PDF or image file), but it's entire purpose is to preserve family history for as long as possible.

https://www.familysearch.org/memories/

It's a service provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (of which I'm a member), which considers preserving family history to be a core tenet. To the point of storing family history records in the Granite Mountain Vault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Mountain_(Salt_Lake_Co...)

> a core tenant

tenet:

a principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy.

tenant:

a person who occupies land or property rented from a landlord.

My experience doing this, granted two generations removed and all information existing before the digital era, was predicated on access to local, university, and church libraries/librarians.

If you can get a hard document into the preserved record, at a university, library, church, newspaper, etc you can have some assurance that humans for the next century will do their best to try and preserve it.

For example, the original copy of my grandfather's graduate thesis which is partially handwritten (the rest by typewriter - what isn't typed was done before typesetting was available to the average midwestern grad student in the 40s) is in a university library, and was digitally cataloged about 15 years ago. I have a bound copy that I got by contacting the librarians there and plan to give as a holiday gift to all of his children (my dad, his siblings).

Similarly, my grandmother kept detailed records of her local music clubs' meetings, including annotated program notes and scores. We found these by combing through six decades of scores that she'd kept in boxes in her basement (thank god there was never a flood or fire).

I told my brother and sister that they should keep hard copies of their writings around, and duplicates in safe deposit boxes or similar document storage for their kids/grandkids if they exist.

At the end of the day you need to trust institutions that will preserve information longer than a generation or two, which are libraries and banks.

One area that may not be obviously interesting is that your local community probably has a library and probably does not have much detailed published information on its history. And you probably have a local history society made up of volunteers. These organizations will last longer than you or I and you can trust if you publish something they care about (a local history, catalog of people, yourself, your neighbors, etc) those documents will long outlast you.

We think of paper as being cheap and easily destroyed, but paper documents often survive centuries. As long as there are people to keep it safe it will be around.

I say self-publish a book, print a few copies, then provide copies to your family members. You could also keep a copy or two in a trunk or something with other items that are intended to be passed down.

My family has a couple of family cookbooks where we've done something similar.

Archival quality CD's are the way to go if it is for your own families use.

For example https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/cd/archival-gr...

A great site explaining the differences in discs is https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...

> I would love for my great grandchildren to be able to read the things I write today, and see the photos I’ve taken.

Be honest with yourself here.

This stuff is probably going to be of less than 0 interest to your great grandchildren and anything the intervening generations have to maintain is just a burden on them.

What is it specifically that makes you think your great grandchildren will be interested in what you write today and the photos you take today?

I would search for services that are very likely a long time around. The first and almost only thing, that comes to mind is a AWS S3 bucket. I'm pretty sure, that S3 will be around the next decades. Nobody knows the future of Amazon, but we can assume that the data stored in S3 has enough value for enough people on this planet, that S3 will last a loooong time. I can't imagine 100 years, but if something from our time last this long, it will be S3.

Now you just find a way to pay Amazon lot's of money in advance. Maybe someone will build a company around this idea?

But where do you store the URL for the S3 bucket? Can you really say it's usefully preserved if nobody knows the URL (or the account credentials)?

The cheapest DigitalOcean VM is about $4/month, or $48/year. I reckon, given current market trends, that if you were to offer someone, say, a $1200 one-time payment today to maintain that VM in perpetuity, you could probably get a pretty good deal. That kind of money invested into the stock market will handily outperform $48 / year even with a good amount of risk.

A perpetual trust of some sort would probably be the way to go, here.

This is nit-picky of me but at a 4% safe withdrawal rate (of 1200 that's $48), there's chance that that doesn't last thirty years (a common period for retirement analysis). The issue becomes sequence of returns risk. In early retirement circles, a lot of conservative folks will trends towards 3% or even 2% withdrawal rates to avoid potential for running out.

There's a lot of discussion and analysis out there on the internet if you search for "4% rule", "retirement withdrawal rates", and the like it you're curious.

Generally speaking 4% is solid, but would maybe move that number up a bit for a perpetual VM payment.

OP can also implement this concept themselves, it'd just be more accounting.

No need to apologize, the 4% rule was indeed what I was thinking of here. The lower a % you can aim for, the higher your odds of not running into some variation of gambler's ruin at n years, where n = 10, 100, 1000...

... My real point is simply that eternity is expensive, at least if you have to pay up front.

> Own physical bedroom server requires maintenance which can’t be done when you’re dead.

How about just putting the things onto a USB disk, or several of them, for redundancy purposes? One hopes JPEG and PDF (or HTML) will be around for another 100 years. No guarantees for USB though, the USB standard might be USB 3.2 Gen 17x69 Rev 42 Type Q in a few years.

Stone tablets stored in a cave worked reasonably well historically. Alternately print them in a book with archive quality paper and ink and give them out. alternatively creatr a static site with hugo or similar and hand that out to everyone and email a zipped copy as well.

Oh cnc them ibto stainless steel plates. Then they can silk screen them onto paper if they need copies.

Similar discussions from before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065088

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41584922

In the center of the world

https://www.historyingranite.org/things-to-see/maze-of-honor...

https://permanent.org/ is built for this purpose, you can buy service in perpetuity from them. The Internet Archive is another option.

>How would you solve this?

Publish it anywhere and make sure the wayback machine can index it.

https://web.archive.org

The best I can think of is hosting a static site on the Netlify free tier, i.e. example.netlify.app. Nothing to renew or maintain.

Nothing lasts forever. A few do, however, last for a long time, the best being a few decades, especially in the digital world.

I can guarantee that Netlify [insert other freemium hosting providers] will eventually die sooner than you think.

Honestly I doubt that's the best you can think of. Try harder? Netlify was founded in 2014. That's 10 years ago. They probably won't be around in 2034, let alone 2030. I can almost guarantee it.

Publish it as a physical book, deposit it with the Library of Congress (or comparable institution in your jurisdiction).

Onus will be on them to maintain the data. Or write for the new york times or similar.

Arweave if you want to use a blockchain built for it, or upload it to the bitcoin blochchain

Your own website, then archive it.

Write everything in a book, publish it. Make it & yourself famous.

How tech change in just 40 years. https://xkcd.com/1909/

I also use <username>.github.io and https://archive.org/ (offline at the moment)

I would put it on IPFS.

Jokes are fun and all, but we should at least try to answer the question.

aaand it's gone

Start a wikipedia page.

I think your question is backwards. You need to start the family first then write something to pas on.

Paper.

> I would love for my great grandchildren to be able to read the things I write today, and see the photos I’ve taken.

Then you need an organization that’s going to care about your writings and photos.

Maybe this is your children and your children are going to then do whatever it takes to maintain your writings and the family photo album just like generations have done.

The only way for things to outlive you is for you to have something that other people want to continue to work on or consume.

That’s literally the only way

If your iCloud account (or whatever) goes abandoned, then a corporation who doesn’t care at all about you is just going to delete your account and all of your information unless you continue to have a commercial transaction with them.

Maintaining a commercial transaction means someone maintains a bank ledger that can support that.

Maintaining a bank ledger that you can support that after you die means that you have some person who is maintaining that managing it maintaining the relationship with the bank, etc…

The writings of Rumi are going to continue to promulgate throughout the Earth, long after Rumi’s death because other people care what they say, and it was encoded in a form and distributed in a way that a lot of people decided to take it

If you cannot create that kind of momentum, then there’s nothing you can do technologically that maintain that

Do something worth doing and it Might be maintained

I’ll give you my personal example of this: I, along with Dave West, Bryce Johnson, Ben Hedges totally re-created 97.7 KAFA the radio station for the United States Air Force Academy from 2006-2008. Prior to me taking over as music Director and later general manager, we had no presence on the Internet. We had no coverage in the Colorado Springs area. We had no formatting. We had nothing structural, we had nothing institutional. Our funding was basically zero and there was no ability for us to maintain or grow.

Over the ensuing 2 1/2 years of work I led a frequency change, widespread marketing, antenna improvement, permanent funding and structured programming. 97.7 KAFA became a permanent and powerful part of the propaganda arm of the US Air Force. That continues and is now maintained and has been maintained for 20 years after I left. It still has the same format. It still uses the same software (NexGen), they have the same segments, they do exactly what the structure is that I put in place.

I haven’t had any input into that since 2008 and it’s thriving: https://www.usafa.edu/radio/

That’s how you create a legacy, hard work, unique determination, and bringing people into a system such that they will maintain it irrespective of your input or not.

If you don’t do that, then nothing you do is going to last

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