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Top-level
 Imagine if YouTube was shut down. It would be a literal tragedy for the human race. Billions of hours worth of creativity would disappear in an instant. "That would never happen!" some believe. But it already has. Remember Google+? All of it's gone forever. Or remember all that media stored on MySpace? It's vanished. We must stop depending on Big Tech to archive our data. Their mandate is to profit off our data, not preserve it. 35 comments
Actually, I kind of wish there was a universal P2P protocol that was a mixture of HTTP and BitTorrent. That alone would fix so many problems with the Internet! @anji I've used IPFS for three years, and I've yet to see broad adoption apart from crypto. If something like archive.org were stored on IPFS, then that would be a game changer. @polychrome @anji Okay, but hear me out. What if archive.org was decentralized, and every library and university in the world ran an instance? @polychrome @atomicpoet @anji it's true - you cannot trust anyone who's motives are not preservation to preserve your media. Archiving has been getting increasingly difficult and expensive over the years as the volume and diversity of media goes up, and it's expensive. I'd go one further and say optical media - not necessarily CD/DVD, though - is the way to go - formed by irreversible chemical/ mechanical processes. Tapes and disks are fine - but are erasable and so less durable. @polychrome @atomicpoet @anji also - tape heads have a finite lifetime (in hours read). Many kinds of tape machines (and this heads) which were once common are no longer manufactured: thus there is a finite supply of tape heads. There are archives in the world which have more hours of media stored in them than there are tape head hours in the world. So some of the archive is already lost - it's just we have to decide which bit we don't recover.  @polychrome @atomicpoet @anji LTO Tape drives are quite popular for archival purposes, as they don't lose data easily when not in use for a long time. @polychrome @atomicpoet @anji You can't expect non-commercial instance to be reliable if you don't support it. Support instance (mastodon, peertube, etc..) or setup/share your own and will last forever.  I plan to use the 3.5"HDs to store expanded source trees, software/distro, and the complete EXR-stream renders of my output. The EXRs are "intermediates". Regenerating them is expensive, but it is an automatic process, once the software is running. I'll use the optical M-Disc media to store source files, PNG streams, video renders, and software archives. As for the volatility of PeerTube, that's why I'm running my own instance, now. Hopefully this works. 🤞  @polychrome @atomicpoet @anji the recent threat by #Google to oust #GSuiteLegacy users who wouldn't pay the ransom gave a new perspective on the net-archives, faced as I was with somehow finding new homes for 16 years worth of life-history data for 8 users. I think we must accept that "Digital Archive" is a contradiction in terms, a transient transport from A to B. Digital 'artifacts' are a 'volatile' variable contained within a scope that will inevitably be garbage collected. @atomicpoet @anji It looks like archive.org is actually planning to use IPFS. Have to look up the source later, currently at work. @atomicpoet @anji ok, here's a follow up to this. Looks like they removed any evidence for that, the only thing I could fine was a cut version of the interview on archive.org. The whole interview isn't available anymore. @anji @atomicpoet ipfs backs a lot of Library Genesis. It's working well enough for them. I think it's just a matter of time.  @atomicpoet IPFS is one of the distribution mechanisms used by Library Genesis.   @atomicpoet Welcome to the #interpeer project, or at least where I hope it'll be in a few months. @atomicpoet For something like archiving, IPFS may actually be a good choice. The goal for us is broader, and also support real-time scenarios such as live broad-/manycasting, as well as collaborative editing. IPFS has a few features that mean it doesn't lend itself all that well to those scenarios where there are frequent updates to a resource. @atomicpoet imo that would be great not only from data preservation standpoint, but also just because it's more convenient. I can't even count how many times I had to waste time waiting for slow CDNs that are thousands of kilometers away to give me data I want. Decentralization not only makes it more persistent, but also makes content delivery much faster. But I guess at that point in time average person won't really care about that, unfortunately.  @atomicpoet   @atomicpoet I also like the aims of PeerTube, but being based on ActivityPub it seems to have some of the same limitations as Mastodon. Lack of global search, discovery, trends, etc. It would be nice to be able to easily search for and discover all content everywhere from any server… That’s part of what makes YouTube (and Twitter) so good. @anji @atomicpoet I'm 99% sure it would be possible to make something like this with the existing videos on PeerTube based on ActivityPub. I'm 0% sure you can currently easily search for and discover all content currently on YouTube, let alone all the content that's been deleted because YouTube didn't like it. @raphaelmorgan @atomicpoet If someone on your local server doesn’t follow or boost a remote post/video, it never appears and cannot be found in search… That’s a problem, I think. Not arguing that a centralized solution is better than a distributed one! But the ActivityPub follow/boost model which doesn’t proactively announce a servers content to the entire network frustrates me sometimes.  @anji @atomicpoet But here is the thing (notice that I don't understand much about fediverse yet). Peertube, in its own, is decentralized and uses P2P, so this scenario is harder to happen than Youtube or other platforms. But if a specific Peertube instance goes down, what happens with the videos stored on that specific instance? Same thing with Funkwhale instances, Pixelfed instances and other instances of fediverse webpages. @icg937 Actually, my Pixelfed instance has gone down multiple times. You could still view the content from other instances. That's the magic of ActivityPub. |
Gregory's Server
One reason I hope PeerTube takes off is because:
1. It's decentralized
2. It uses a P2P delivery system
That's one step in the right direction -- but I hope other social media networks follow their lead.