Comment on Online Content Is Disappearing
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
I’ve often wondered what the implications of the internet will be for future historians. In the one hand, there is now an enormous body of writings from not just the educated elite as in the past but from all sorts of ordinary people, which is something that has never really existed before.
On the other hand, how and for how long will these writings be retained? If we stop writing things in paper, will these digital writings become completely inaccessible at some point?
Freely licensed works will be preserved a lot better because there will be more copies of them.
Likewise the fediverse is a step in that direction: this message will be federated to hundreds of servers so is more likely to survive longer than if I posted it to reddit.
how long? until next sufficiently large solar flare
There are so many way to adequately protect digital information from solar flares. That would be the least of our problems, the actually dangerous part of geomagnetic storms is the severe power outages and the severance of the electrical grid.
EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
Already a lot of stuff is becoming one harddrive failure away from being lost forever. Companies don’t care about preserving content, so it’s largely up to random people happening to have saved a copy of something for it to still exist at all.
belit_deg@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And National Libraries and similar institutions around the world, for example www.nb.no/en/digital-preservation/