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492 points vladyslavfox | 8 comments | | HN request time: 0.215s | source | bottom
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trompetenaccoun ◴[] No.41895988[source]
We need archives built on decentralized storage. Don't get me wrong, I really like and support the work Internet Archive is doing, but preserving history is too important to entrust it solely to singular entities, which means singular points of failure.
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sksxihve ◴[] No.41896420[source]
There's no real financial incentive for people to archive the data as a singular entity so even less for a distributed collection. Also it's probably easier to fund a single entity sufficiently so they can have security/code audits than a bunch of entities all trying to work together.
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riiii ◴[] No.41896664[source]
Some people are motivated by more than just financial incentive.
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1. sksxihve ◴[] No.41896894[source]
That's true, but something like archiving the internet is very costly, IA has an annual budget in the tens of millions.
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2. trompetenaccoun ◴[] No.41897103[source]
Yes, it's a good point. Though they could take that money and reward people for hosting the data as well, couldn't they? They don't have to be in charge of hosting.
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3. ◴[] No.41897289[source]
4. sksxihve ◴[] No.41897399[source]
Yes, they could, that's not much different than a single company distributing the archive to multiple storage centers though. My original comment was about it being more cost effective for a single company to do that than coordinating with a bunch of disjoint entities.
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5. trompetenaccoun ◴[] No.41897992{3}[source]
Our digital memory shouldn't be in the hands of a small number of organizations in my view. You're right about cost effectiveness. There are pros and cons to both but it's not just external threats that have to be considered.

History has always gotten rewritten throughout time. If you have a giant library it's easier for bad actors to gain influence and alter certain books, or remove them. This isn't just theoretical, under external pressure IA has already removed sites from its archive for copyright and political reasons.

There are also threats that are generally not even considered because they happen with rare frequency, but when they happen they're devastating. The library of Alexandria was burned by Julius Caesar during a war. Likewise, if all your servers are in one country that geographic risk, they can get destroyed in the event of a war or such. No one expects this to happen today in the US, but archives should be robust long term, for decades, ideally even centuries.

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6. BlueTemplar ◴[] No.41898647[source]
So, about $0.01 per person per year ?

We are talking about an (almost) worldwide archive after all.

7. delfinom ◴[] No.41898868{4}[source]
>Our digital memory shouldn't be in the hands of a small number of organizations in my view.

I would wager at least 95% of "digital memory" archived is just absolute garbage from SEO spam to just some small websites holding no actual value.

The true digital memory of the world is almost entirely behind the walls of reddit, twitter, facebook, and very few other sites. The internet landscape has changed massively from the 90s and 2000s.

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8. sprkwd ◴[] No.41902448{5}[source]
We are currently in the middle of an information dark age and not many people have realised this yet.