Web history and IPFS

Dave Winer on the continued disappearance of old web sites:

"I've tried to sound the alarms. Every day we lose more of the history of the web. Every day is an opportunity to act to make sure we don't lose more of it. And we should be putting systems into place to be more sure we don't lose future history."

Earlier this week, Steven Frank pointed to a new format and protocol called IPFS, which Neocities is embracing. Copies of your content would live in multiple nodes across the web instead of in a single, centralized location. From their blog post:

"Distributing the web would make it less malleable by a small handful of powerful organizations, and that improves both our freedom and our independence. It also reduces the risk of the 'one giant shutdown' that takes a massive amount of data with it."

I took some time to read through what it can do, and I’d like to support it for the publishing platform that’s in my new microblogging project. I don’t know if it’s technically feasible yet, but I love that someone is trying to solve this. We just have to start somewhere.

Manton Reece @manton