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The Internet Is Failing The Website Preservation Test (archive.ph)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This is something that keeps me worried at night. Unlike other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets, information on the Internet can just blink into nonexistence when the server hosting it goes offline. This makes it difficult for future anthropologists who want to study our history and document the different Internet epochs. For my part, I always try to send any news article I see to an archival site (like archive.ph) to help collectively preserve our present so it can still be seen by others in the future.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I think preservation is happening, the issue lies in accessibility. Projects like Archive.org are the public ones, but it is certain that private organizations are doing the same, just not making it public.

This is also something that is my biggest worry about the Fediverse. It has tools to deal with it, but they are self-contained. No search engine is crawling the Fediverse as far as I've looked, and no initiative to archive, index and overall make the content of the Fediverse accessible is currently in place, and that's a big risk. I'm sure we will soon be seeing loss of information for this reason, if not already happened.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's still fairly new, I'm confident we'll see fediverse crawlers before too long. Especially with all the attention it's getting and more developers turning their interests here. I also saw some talk about instance mirroring that would allow backups should an instance go down. Things are in motion.

Absolutely a problem at the moment but I'm not too worried for the future tbh.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Oh yeah, my hopes are high, I already am quite fond of this new home. :)