Yea some kind of fork of the torrent protocol where you can advertise “I have X amount of space to donate” and there’s a mechanism to give you the most endangered bytes on the network maybe. Would need to be a lot more granular than torrents to account for the vast majority of nodes not wanting or being capable of getting to “100%”.

I don’t think the technical aspects are insurmountable, and there’s at least some measure of a builtin audience in that a lot of people run archiveteam warrior containers/VMs. But storage is just so many orders of magnitude more expensive than letting a little cpu/bandwidth limited process run in the background. I don’t know that enough people would be willing/able to donate enough to make it viable?

~70 000 data hoarders volunteering 1TB each to be a 1-1 backup of the current archive.org isn’t a small number of people, and that’s only to get a single parity copy. But it also isn’t an outrageously large number of people.