Alex Schroeder 🐝 is a user on octodon.social. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse. If you don't, you can sign up here.

We tell each other to self host in order to escape the big corps. But when we die, all the self hosted stuff is going to get wiped and history will only remember the archives that got stored by the big corps. And you know how history is written by the winners. Do we need a way to automatically hand over our sites to archive.org or similar? Or send them disc images? Nobody expects to get run over by a car but some of us will, today. I made no plans for this.

@kensanata "Save page now" on archive.org/web/

However, they automatically index pretty much everything that's truly public. Meaning no archiving of ANY Facebook posts etc., because of the login wall. So no, the corps will not remember you for the rest of history. The Internet Archive will.

@kensanata That said, I hope they have offsite backups of all their petabytes, because if The Big One hits SF, who knows what's going to happen.

@krozruch @raucao @kensanata They should open up torrents so that people can seed the data forever, this also stops them from erasing the past.

@siraben @krozruch @raucao Or you could create a federal mandate: make them part of the Library of Congress and make it a mandate that they save a copy of everything, including copyright exemption. They can stop publishing contested material but they will keep a copy. And people can at least walk on and make their own copies.

@kensanata @krozruch @raucao I don't know what the best compromise is for archiving the internet. Is more always better? Do we really need to remember every version of every single meme in the future? Maybe. Who knows if they'll be useful? But then again, maybe not.

Alex Schroeder 🐝 @kensanata

@siraben @krozruch @raucao somebody will need to write a PhD on early Internet and Memes and politics and all that in 100 years. Just like there are thousands and thousands of students scouring old newspapers counting instances of this and that, trying to figure something out.