I think it would be really cool, don’t you think the same?
Like, using Iroh + INS for a fully descentralized, uncensorable, undeletable, non-redundant, fast, secure, private, efficient, directionable CAS, then binding that to ActivityPub —or even better, ActivityPods—, so you can register to the instances that are archiving what is more interesting to you and subscribe to the archivists and topics you prefer.
Wouldn’t be cool? Or do you think it’s not as good as it seems to me?
Edit: I mean, archiving the Web, like Wayback Machine (with a similar UX) but descentralized and 100% FLOSS.
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uncensorable, undeletable
Perhaps I don’t understand what you mean with private, but this seems like an awful idea. Hosting unmoderated content will lead to trouble as soon as csam, doxxing, or any other illegal content appears and making everything undeletable might seem like the entire point of an archive, but it’s also woefully disrespectful to the original authors to keep their content online after they have expressed to remove it (not to mention gdpr stuff).
Yeah, was going to say. Anna’s Archive was targeted when they decided to drag music into the mix. What did that get them? Attention from the record labels. The Internet Archive has been targeted of multiple lawsuits, they’re not immune. Just like a decentralized archive will not be immune. If you host it from the US, you’re asking for trouble.
I don’t think so if it’s not in a single central server. Although I can be wrong, that’s not the point I mean by uncensorable and undeletable, what I mean is something like a government, agency or person can’t arbitrarily try to shut down, censor or delete something legitimate that’s archived, like has actually happened with Wayback Machine (and what’s thus one of the main reason why I propose this); of course I don’t want CSAM, doxxing, GPDR violations or illegal content whatsoever, and if the authors wants their content deleted, they obviously have the right to be forgotten, but there’s also situations when a web is totally taken down in a illegal or arbitrary way, or when something turns into lost media or almost lost media, and that’s when this is valuable, along with making the collective memory more reliable and durable.
I think with the current architecture of the fediverse it’s already quite hard for government actors and such to have arbitrary content be taken down, as any content gets federated to all the followers’ instances, where it will be stored afaik pretty much indefinitely. An exception to this would be media and external links, so an archive instance could focus on storing those as well.
Yes, the point with Iroh and IPFS is that they are content-adressed, and therefore addressable, so they massively deduplicate what is uploaded, and as a consequence there is hardly any redundant data, if not no redundant data, and that makes it more efficient, reducing the bandwidth and space required on all nodes, so if something is archived once, then all subsequent archives of that same thing will be just references to the original file, and will be very resilient since It’s like a torrent (you can seed, pin, or hydrate the content so it won’t disappear so easily).
isn’t this just ipfs?
I don’t think so, because IPFS is just more sort of a framework and platform to those kind of applications, something as Nostr or some types of S3 storages, or a CDN. What’s necessary thus is all the business logic, the specialized nodes and clients, the metadata, identifiers and namespaces so that that application is not just a directory spread over IPFS (or in our case, Iroh, which is much better than the vanilla IPFS node, Kubo). Something also like in HTTPS you don’t see a lot of loose hyperlinks, but rather applications that use HTTPS underneath as another layer.
i don’t see why it has to be specialised. you could do this with mastodon today. just post every ipfs uri as a message.
It’s better in my view. It can be done but then it’s again scattered. Like, what I think about is something like Wayback Machine but totally FLOSS and descentralized.
If you are super smart maybe you could pull it off. Otherwise, it seems pretty difficult to implement it.
Basically a blockchain verification problem
Yes, although in theory you can completely do without a Blockchain and instead use the Holochain for the entire transaction book and the backlog, although without anything economic involved since an archive has to be accessible to anyone — except perhaps some small profit in tokens for seeding, pinning and/or archiving websites or any other type of content, so that there is an incentive to make it functional. Using small-world topology to optimize such CAS also sounds attractive.
uncensorable
I don’t really see the point from a censorship standpoint. I mean, if a moderated community or instance is seeing posts being removed, whoever wants to post there is probably not going to have a good time there in the first place. Like, you probably want to be in a different community or instance that doesn’t take issue with whatever the content is that’s being posted.
EDIT: Oh, maybe I’m misunderstanding. You’re trying to archive the Web and then publish activity about that to ActivityPub, rather than archive ActivityPub and create a Web interface?
Yeah, it’s archiving the Web (and more, basically a digital time capsule) then publish that to AP so it’s more accesible, and of course have a web and/or a native client where you can manage easily all of that (with a UX similar to the one in Wayback Machine).
Isn’t this just a variant of IPFS?
Repost: I don’t think so, because IPFS is just more sort of a framework and platform to those kind of applications, something as Nostr or some types of S3 storages, or a CDN. What’s necessary thus is all the business logic, the specialized nodes and clients, the metadata, identifiers and namespaces so that that application is not just a directory spread over IPFS (or in our case, Iroh, which is much better than the vanilla IPFS node, Kubo). Something also like in HTTPS you don’t see a lot of loose hyperlinks, but rather applications that use HTTPS underneath as another layer.
