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 @raucao @siraben I can see only one problem with that in the sense that it might then be argued they need federal funding, which could open them to pressures that might challenge their independence. I don't know that that will be the case and I don't know how they are funded now, but it is one potential concern to anticipate.
Alex Schroeder 🐝 @kensanata

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