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Alex Schroeder

I keep thinking about self-hosting and people dying, myself included. So my first wish for the end of the year is a solar-powered machine that takes all my websites and turns them into clay tablets to bury and survive the coming darkness.

Other than that, however, I think the solution would have to involve a kind decentralized archive sharing where I offer an archive (zip, tarball) for download and whoever has it can share it peer-to-peer with others. Is this how torrents work? I think I don't understand what words like "tracker" mean. Also, where does the original torrent come from and where does it go? I know there are sites where I can search for and download torrent files. But what happens if Alice has a file she wants to share with others including Bob, does she create a torrent and offers it on her website, Bob finds it, downloads it, runs a torrent client and gets a copy. If Alice and her website disappear, how does Charlie get a copy now? Bob isn't hosting Alice's torrent file on his website. So are they all dependent on a torrent hosting site?

I'm only half-aware of IPFS and when I read the Wikipedia page, there's stuff about hashes and content addressing, but how does that work from a user perspective? Is there a directory? How does Charlie learn about Alice's site that's no longer online and how does Charlie get a copy from Bob? Can Bob make a list of files on offer and Charlie can get them all, maybe from Bob and maybe from others?

In this case, preservation would mean: you need people interested in keeping a copy; the copies need to survive; the copies must be listed; the lists must be distributed widely; at least some people must make copies of these lists.

So, for me and you and some other fedi randos, we could have a "fedi website archive" list where our names are listed together with the hashes pointing to the content, and some ipfs client would keep it in sync.

The next question, though: how do keep this list updated? What little I know about these chains is that they are immutable so is there a way to say: "this is the updated list"? That would require some sort of social control and trust, too. An association of the living members of the "fedi website archive" list that manages the yearly updates, perhaps?

And so how would the maintenance actually work, I wonder. I write a web app. We chat. (I think the human element is important.) You have an account based on an email address and upload an archive and give it a name (the name of your website, a short description, its current URL). Once a year, the living associates meet and discuss whether to dump some of their members who have turned fascist or whatnot (sadly, always a possibility). Then we use the data gathered by the website to generate a new "directory" list with names, description, URL and hash (the URL may no longer work) and all the members share or host (??) this new directory and drop previous directories so that the old versions of our sites can be forgotten. And the ipfs clients do the magic of actually exchanging the archive bytes?

Would that work? Would you want to be part of this association? We could create an association according to Swiss law. There are some famous international orgs that use this format.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_association

17 comments | Expand all CWs
Ed Summers

@alex interesting questions! I found myself thinking of how #webrings could fit in somewhere.

Ed Summers

@alex For some community archiving work [1] I've been helping evaluate ipfs-cluster for adding/deleting pins (files) amongst a group of collaborators. I do find myself worrying about overcommitting to IPFS because even after all these years it doesn't seem to get used by many in actual production systems. But maybe that's not fair.

[1] shiftcollective.us/ffdw/

Ed Summers

@alex we have been focused on getting static site exports out of dynamic web applications, and onto ipfs-cluster where they can then be replicated amongst friendly organizations. But really the harder part so far has been, like you said, the social governance part.

inkdroid.org/2024/10/20/pincus

Alex Schroeder

@edsu This is a great post, in any case! Oddmu tries to do the same: all the pages you write, all the files you upload, everything can be downloaded as a static website. The dynamic wiki application on top of it is essentially optional. The part that I'm missing is what you tried to figure out with IPFS so this totally my line of thinking.

I really should write a blog post about this as well and link to yours. To leave a trace of all this. Thanks!

bouncepaw šŸ„

@alex AFAIK IPFS has no content editing nor deletion. That sounded like a no-no to me, but then I remembered we're talking about dead people. It's gonna be fine, I think?

Alex Schroeder

@bouncepaw Well, I would need to get started now and so while we're alive our sites keep growing.

Alex Schroeder

I've been thinking about an association to keep our own archives online. At one point I had taken some model articles of association and written them up for a podcast of mine. At the time, this didn't go anywhere. But for this archiving association, I think the association comes first, the technicalities come later.
https://transjovian.org/view/archives/index

I'm envisioning discussions to happen via email. Or via encrypted email, even! šŸ¤Æ

(Is this the moment for Delta Chat to shine?)

I've been thinking about an association to keep our own archives online. At one point I had taken some model articles of association and written them up for a podcast of mine. At the time, this didn't go anywhere. But for this archiving association, I think the association comes first, the technicalities come later.
https://transjovian.org/view/archives/index

Alex Schroeder

When I create a static copy of my site, it takes 2.9G.
If I zip it up, it takes 2.8G because pictures and videos do not compress well. šŸ˜­

Alex Schroeder

So given the size of our archives, what are the technical requirements for members of the Dead Archivist Society? Iā€™ve wrote some stuff up, essentially arguing that size limits and learning about resampling media files will be important because storage is in fact not all that cheap. And that sort of limits the size of the society.

Alex Schroeder

A few people are interested the Dead Archivist Society Iā€™m trying to start. I got some feedback on the articles of association and Iā€™m trying to assemble it all into a new page so that I donā€™t forget any input. From my point of view, itā€™s astonishing how much text we will have to write in order to handle non-local membership. Authentication and identity are hard if you donā€™t meet face to face.

https://transjovian.org/view/archives/index

Preuk

@alex
To quote project page:

> It is hard to send our words into the future. We donā€™t have the means to burn clay tablets and we donā€™t print paper books to be sent to the archives of our time. We have to create our own electronic archives while weā€™re alive.

The funny thing is this might be possible, I don' know about CH, but in FR any published work must be archived at the BibliothĆØque Nationale... and websites can be too! bnf.fr/en/help-center/web-lega

Alex Schroeder

@Preuk Interesting modalities. Automatic collection, but no public access. That is a way to protect yourself from lawsuits, for sure. I wonder how they decide on ā€œdomiciled in Franceā€ ā€“ by top level domain? I used to be a French citizen until about 2007. Did they archive my pages? Did they remove the archives? I never used the .fr top-level domain. Also, almost none of my pages are in French. But that doesnā€™t seem to be a requirement. I wonder if Switzerland has a similar program.

Alex Schroeder

@Preuk I just found the Swiss Web Archive! But I assume only people of interest will get added, not ordinary citizens.

ā€œThe Web Archive Switzerland collection is being built up in partnership with the Swiss cantonal libraries and other interested institutions. The identification of websites and their preliminary indexing is carried out by the partner institutions. The NL is responsible for collecting the selected websites, listing them in Helveticat, archiving them and making them available.ā€
https://www.nb.admin.ch/snl/en/home/information-professionals/e-helvetica/web-archive-switzerland.html

@Preuk I just found the Swiss Web Archive! But I assume only people of interest will get added, not ordinary citizens.

ā€œThe Web Archive Switzerland collection is being built up in partnership with the Swiss cantonal libraries and other interested institutions. The identification of websites and their preliminary indexing is carried out by the partner institutions. The NL is responsible for collecting the selected websites, listing them in Helveticat, archiving them and making them available.ā€
...

Preuk

@alex long-term blogs *are* valuable as historic chronicles.

In french but awesome:
bnf.fr/fr/la-bibliotheque-nati

To sum it up: they archived a free blogging platform heavily used by french teens in 2000's

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