A federated internet archive, I'm wondering whether I should build it myself. With so many journalists being banned for reporting the gaza genocide we need more ways to combat censorship.

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[–] PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com 26 points 1 month ago (2 children)

A federated internet archive, I'm wondering whether I should build it myself. With so many journalists being banned for reporting the gaza genocide we need more ways to combat censorship.

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I know lots of people are crypto-reactionaries... But there are like dozens of these projects in the (primarily open source) crypto space. The basic idea seems to be that a crypto-archive uses a blockchain for hosting and a cryptocurrency to fund it. I don't know how successful these projects have been. Here are a few quick examples from a search:

[–] ClathrateG@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Using a blockchain to store any data beyond a little bit of text e.g. images and videos(hence why NFTs are stored as links to where an image was hosted, rather than the data of the image file itself living on the blockchain) is just incredibly inefficient and impractical however you slice it

A PeerTube like architecture would be far better(faster etc)

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 month ago

i think https://ipfs.io/ is basically perfect for this kind of thing, and indeed they've already done some working trying to make a decentralized internet archive happen: https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-archive/blob/master/docs/archive_architecture_ipfs.md

[–] sonalder@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Yes blockchain is an horible database design for efficiency. If it's decentralised, open and permissionless, if not you just don't need a blockchain.

But it's good at immutability.

[–] kazerniel@piefed.world 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My main concern would be how to prevent tampering with archived pages - the owner of the second most popular site after Wayback Machine, archive.is, has been known to modify the content of archived pages for petty personal reasons. And without the sanctity of archives, the whole exercise loses its value as proof of records of the past.

[–] morto@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

maybe that would be a rare case of some blockchain-like structure being actually useful? But without any kind of tokenization, of course

[–] kazerniel@piefed.world 2 points 1 month ago

yeah this may be an actual use case