This does indeed hurt. Then I think about the forever memory of the internet and how everything ever put on it will likely stay forever, and the terrible terrible content on it. Then it hurts a little less.
Except the impermanence of the internet under varying conditions such as repressive censorship by oligarchs/fascists, rising operating costs, or even maintainers simply losing interest is rapidly showing itself.
“The internet is forever” may have been wishful thinking 😭
I mean yeah, all the electricity could stop working and then how would we get on the internet? I like to think about this scenario sometimes, how there would just be all this hardware laying around with all this data on it and no way to access it.
People who have solar won’t have to worry about that too much.
The mainline infrastructure might go down, but as long as you can provide your own power and have your own setup, anything you archive and backup will still be accessible to you.
Then people can link routers to create mesh-style intranets and pass around USBs to share data between “islands”. Maybe even use long-range point-to-point links to connect meshes in a wider area.
This does indeed hurt. Then I think about the forever memory of the internet and how everything ever put on it will likely stay forever, and the terrible terrible content on it. Then it hurts a little less.
The internet absolutely does not have a forever memory. But you can contribute to the internet’s preservation by running an Archive Team Warrior.
so many things that were once on the internet are now lost
its only forever for popular stuff
Go find me wrathbait fanfics then.
Except the impermanence of the internet under varying conditions such as repressive censorship by oligarchs/fascists, rising operating costs, or even maintainers simply losing interest is rapidly showing itself.
“The internet is forever” may have been wishful thinking 😭
Yeah, the internet hasn’t even been around long enough that the original devs have started dying off.
Imagine in a 100 years when literally no project is still run by its original maintainer. What’s gonna happen then?
There’s gonna be a really strange transition period in about 40-50 years when this starts becoming an issue…
That thought never considered sociatal collapse or plain lack of backups.
How many backup archives of the internet archive do we got going? 😭
And who’s archiving all the stuff that the Internet Archive, being a ‘white hat’ organization that respects robots.txt, omits?
Like 0 full copies? And internet archive itself archived maybe a percent of everything.
IA also succumbs to pressure/legal/government threats which hurts.
I think ghostarchive has some stuff at least
Except it’s not forever. It could definitely go away, and I would bet that it will.
I mean yeah, all the electricity could stop working and then how would we get on the internet? I like to think about this scenario sometimes, how there would just be all this hardware laying around with all this data on it and no way to access it.
People who have solar won’t have to worry about that too much.
The mainline infrastructure might go down, but as long as you can provide your own power and have your own setup, anything you archive and backup will still be accessible to you.
Then people can link routers to create mesh-style intranets and pass around USBs to share data between “islands”. Maybe even use long-range point-to-point links to connect meshes in a wider area.
Life uh… finds a way…