778
The Internet Archive is an important resource and needs to be saved.
(www.techradar.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
778 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37554 readers
473 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What if the internet archives, instead of a single site, was a bunch of federated instances sharing content with each other like fediverse?
I am of course very ignorant to how internet archives actually works, and not very tech savy, but would something like I'm suggesting be theoretically possible?
Yes, for storage, if we coordinated enough. Such technologies already exist. But IA also does tons of archival work that isn't so easily distributed. And their lending system isn't easily legally federated.
Ok, but what if we wanted to each take pieces of that tree of knowledge and help others learn from it. Could we possibly hold onto that information and plant our own little trees with seeds? And the more people who had seeds, the faster the tree would ~~download~~ grow.
^Arrrgh matey^
Their lending system is not part of their core functionality and IMO should be a separate thing.
Yeah that was my first thought too. That seems like a way better idea than just entrusting it to the Library of Congress as the article suggests. For one thing, the internet archive isn't just American stuff. For another, there's no way the government won't just bend over backwards as soon as a big corporation asks it to. Thirdly, it seems like a much better idea to keep it decentralized and to keep the corporations playing whack-a-mole with it than to just keep giving them one big, static target to aim at.
you kinda described ipfs
It's an interesting idea. It would take a lot of infrastructure though.
Even if we just decentralised/federated the Wayback Machine, that would really be great.
It's already working like that, at least on the indexer side. You can create an account and use their app or browser extensions and start snapshotting websites you visit and submit them to the wayback machine. Storage is still centralized in The Internet Archive datacenter though.