This is something that keeps me worried at night. Unlike other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets, information on the Internet can just blink into nonexistence when the server hosting it goes offline. This makes it difficult for future anthropologists who want to study our history and document the different Internet epochs. For my part, I always try to send any news article I see to an archival site (like archive.ph) to help collectively preserve our present so it can still be seen by others in the future.

  • CynAq@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    We need deliberate efforts to archive everything efficiently.

    We also need a way to decouple everyone’s personal info from publicly available information about them, keeping in mind that not all publicly available information is intended to be that way.

    Storage ain’t cheap and it definitely ain’t infinite.

    This is a way harder problem than “the internet” being a bit more mindful can solve easily.

    Not to absolve any companies from responsibility or anything.