There is a convention about posting links to archive sites instead of directly. This makes sense to me for various reasons.
Problem is that I have a hard time accessing the archive sites. It used to be mostly archive.is but lately archive.org is also unreliable. Seems to be rate limiting and/or geoblocking. I have seen comments from numerous other people that it is same for them. But obviously it works OK for others. I usually just get some kind of error when trying to access the archived link, and cannot create archive pages either.
I am not sure what to do about this. Sometimes I add both kinds of links (when they are working) but it’s a lot of work. If I really don’t want to link to a page, I add the URL in backticks so it displays plaint text (ex: https://hexbear.net/c/news) I don’t really think it is a fair expectation to do all that; and it’s annoying to read.
I think the archive.org links are easier because you can at least derive the original URL from the archive URL. With archive.is short link there is no way to know. if the person who posts it provides enough information (unedited title, publication), you might be able to web search but often I’m not sure if I am looking at the same page.
But I am not sure. Any bright ideas? I liked archiving pages, ultimately I would prefer to get that functional again though I feel powerless on the matter.
In sidebar of !news@hexbear.net:
- Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
It is reflective of site-wide preferences.
I’ve always thought archive sites would be an interesting decentralization problem to solve. The real hurdles I think would be these:
As we’ve seen with archive.is, its maintainer was willing to alter the content of archives for his petty spat with some blogger. That’s not good for the trustworthiness of the archives themselves.
I could imagin that an archive system could be built using a combination of bittorrent, cryptography, and activitypub.
If you’re on archiveSiteA and request a URL it doesn’t have, it can attempt to find it via federation from other servers. What the servers federate could be a RSS feed of archived URLs, their md5 hash, and magnet link for downloading. If the site is found in those lists it could then pull the contents and surve it to you, or redirect you to the archive that has it.
If it can’t find it on the network you then have the option to pull the site locally to the server.
The really hard part I think would be the verification of archives. The last thing you would want is someone on the network hosting archives of URLs that contain doctored information or even malicious code that loads as part of the archive.
Probably plausible. I wonder if it would run into the problem of many of these distributed sites in that they immediately become giant CSAM hosting projects and nobody wants anything to do with them.