@bortzmeyer Very cool. And old school. "The Web archives are accessible to authorized users of the BnF, in the reading rooms of the Research Library only. This restriction is the same as that which applies to all legal deposit collections. As of June 22th, 2009, the BnF offers 350 computers to consult its Web archives across all its sites, in Paris and in Avignon." Hehehe!

@kensanata This is simply because of copyright and other IP issues. The law gives the authority to the national library to collect the sites (irrespective of robots.txt) , not to publish them.

@bortzmeyer @kensanata “If”

@wrenpile @bortzmeyer hehehe

@algernon @kensanata I should really do that, especially the instructions part. Currently there's no kind of documentation on all the things that need
to be taken care of if I can't anymore.

@algernon @kensanata I'd be very interested in a brief write-up of this process, if you have spare bandwidth. Continuity is something I've been considering, but I don't have a good idea where to start.

@nocko @kensanata I plan to put the skeleton of it up somewhere, likely in the form of a blog post. Sometime in the next few months, whenever time allows. (I've been meaning to do this for a while, now all the more reason to do so.)

@algernon @kensanata @nocko

I've written a simple app to facilitate that https://github.com/mayel/LiveManSwitch

@steckerhalter Federation and self hosting: The End of History, but not in the way you imagined!!

@kensanata 😂

@iona @kensanata Perhaps a buddy system. For e.g. I keep 2 vps in different towns. Each backs up the other. I don't really need two otherwise.
If I had a buddy with similar needs we could back each other up and be a redundant node when one of us got hit by a bus or heart attack.

@gemlog @iona @kensanata

on non commercial internet communities with older age profiles (electronics, amateur radio) there increasingly seem to be arrangements to archive/rehost content as people get older and alas, can often become too unwell to regularly update things (or simply and understandably want to spend their remaining time with their families) - eg I've seen useful but abandoned sites reappear on another domain (with permission from the original authors)

@gemlog @iona sadly I don’t have any such buddies that would be able handle all the admin stuff. But perhaps I just need to talk to one or two and see how interested they are in the subject. And perhaps it would make sense to pick a buddy that’s not the same age, too!

@kensanata @iona Yes. I don't know anyone in IRL either. I was thinking more a long-time internet buddy (buddette?). Like the buddy system of diving or hiking. Perhaps I should pick another word.
Anyhow, basically another someone with a public facing server, so you can rsync backups between you, share dns etc.
It does require a lot of trust though. Maybe an escrow system needs to be built on top for the credentials part.

@bgcarlisle @kensanata I wrote a very basic one (not for Nextcloud though)

@siraben I was thinking about my blog, and source code, and fediverse instances. Free license check. Private backup check. Write it down?! No way. And history is precisely the example I’m thinking off but I want us to do better. But I guess we’re not.

@kensanata Haha, the "write it down" was tongue-in-cheek. The issue with archiving things is that we sometimes archive the wrong things (see time capsules). In digital information you get a lot of storage in a very volatile format. Will your hard drive last a hundred years? Mine won't. The problem is getting worse with higher storage densities.

One active area of research is using crystals to store data, but how funny would it be if our crash reports are more useful to future historians!

@siraben @kensanata
Yes, Norsam Disks and such microscopic laser data storage are a great option, especially when data is stored in human-readable pages.
They still cost an arm and a leg, though. Unless there is a big push to make the tech popular and accessible, we may be living in a dark age of future history.

@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.

@krozruch @siraben Somebody posted this, today: «Note there are also backups by public institutions http://www.bnf.fr/en/professionals/digital_legal_deposit/a.digital_legal_deposit_web_archiving.html If I die, the nationl library will have a copy of my blog :-)»

@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.

@krozruch @raucao @kensanata Exactly. But do we want to have the power to arbitrarily delete content? Who decides what content is kept? Hard questions.

@siraben @krozruch @kensanata They're not that hard, if you accept that anything that is public can be archived by anyone anyway. Learn more about the Internet Archive, and if their FAQ and content aren't enough, ask them questions. This has all been talked about for decades.

@raucao @krozruch @kensanata And yet, by changing your robots.txt you can delete your entire site's history from archive.org look it up, it's happened before.

@siraben @raucao @krozruch Yeah, but they are ignoring robots.txt now, exactly because of this

@krozruch @kensanata @siraben That's provably false. Anyway, have fun negotiating your breakfast choice with someone tomorrow. I'll keep living with minimal politics. Thank you.

@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.

@kensanata @siraben @krozruch The only thing that sure as hell does not survive history are current nation states and their institutions. There are many civil organisations, companies, churches, families, who still maintain archives that are vastly larger than any national collection.

@raucao @siraben @krozruch they don’t all have to end in a fire, though – the successor state might take them, after all.

@kensanata @siraben @krozruch How is that relevant? The risk and dependence aren't worth it. We already have decent civil orgs who are literally doing this right now. With zero of the countless drawbacks of handing control to a central bureaucracy, and all of the benefits of aligned incentives with donors and patrons.

@raucao I was under the impression that they had multiple sites, including one in Canada specifically, but Wikipedia says: «The Archive has data centers in three Californian cities: San Francisco, Redwood City, and Richmond. To prevent losing the data in case of e.g. a natural disaster, the Archive attempts to create copies of (parts of) the collection at more distant locations, currently including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt and a facility in Amsterdam.»
#archive

@raucao @kensanata Anecdotally, I see there are lots of gaps for public-facing websites in IA's crawled coverage, some of them years old. Using the "save page now" function helps not only grab stuff, but seed the crawler.

@raucao @kensanata oh cool. I wonder if there’s a way to trigger this automatically when we publish pages?

@n @kensanata I vaguely remember there being one, but if not, you could just set up a headless browser script.

@raucao @kensanata thanks. This seems like a good feature for any cms.

@raucao @kensanata found it! https://archive.readme.io/docs/creating-a-snapshot

@grainloom I would need simple and understandable instructions on how to achieve it. And I have the feeling that if nobody ever requested a copy and then my server dies, it would disappear from the net, too?

@kensanata with ssb you don't have to actually "request" it, eg. if you follow someone then (by default) you also get the posts from the people they follow (this can be configured with the "hop distance" option)
and that content can still propagate, even if the person loses their account

heck, ssb doesn't even need the web, it could work with flash drives and carrier pigeons

of course that limits what you can do with it, but it opens the door for a lot of interesting new things

@eladhen @kensanata I like the idea of some kind or foundation to keep these archives. Certainly not a big corp; no need to have anyone profit from one's death or post death.

I'm for the internet archive. One should also think about them now or in your will:

https://archive.org/donate/