Donate and contact your government rep

run the archivewarrior to help them out, donate or pressure your government to stop it from being killed.

There’s some old Reddit posts like this too. Advice threads where the person who posted a solution went back and overwrote their comments during the boycott last year. I know why they did it but we still lost some information in the grand scheme of things.

And all the "Thanks! Took two minutes to fix after seeing your post" comments just to rub it in.

The Internet is dead. Long live the Internet!

I'll have my AI agents talk to your AI agents.

The Open Web is definitely dying. Some dystopian weaponized ads hellscape of an apps-required shiternet will be around for a while.

That's an exaggeration. We had nice things back then with forums and ICQ\AIM\others, which we don't have now, but the tech allows us to have them. It's the society that has degraded.

Yes. And wikis, too.
We (people in general) have a tendency to share stuff in forums, like Lemmy. That's fine in the short term, but in the long term this stuff should be sorted, organised, and preferably mirrored. Wikis are perfect for that, while the internet archive is more like "bulk" storage.

You should see it in person. Just drove by it today. Support them!

I’ve heard the early Internet age referred to as the future dark ages. When all the work, information and content is digitized, it’s prone to being lost to history forever.

Because those pages had information that wasn't on the new pages?

Just from my own experience, WotC migrated the Magic the Gathering site to a new one, and while some articles were brought over there were a whole lot of stories, strategies and event coverage that were lost or are only available thanks to Archive.org

I bet a lot of pages were also added in the same time frame, very likely orders of magnitude more.

No. What you'd make a page for in the 00s, you'd create a FB group or something in the 10s. Hostage to corps and probably too removed for whatever reason.

Sure a lot of pages of ad infested ads replaced human produced content.

This is important. I signed up a week ago.

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.

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.

For some real-world examples of this issue, you can look at how the only reason we have any of the early BBC news reels and TV shows is because of copies recorded by people on their TVs. The BBC reused the tapes that they recorded on for new programming to save money on buying tapes. When they started to think about the preservation of news and shows like Dr. Who, they had to turn to the general public and ask them to donate any recordings that they might have made.

It's estimated that more than 50% of all video games are lost forever because companies didn't care to save a master copy, and this has already come back to bite some of these companies in the ass with the recent trend of remakes and remasters. There was a recent remake of one of the GTA games from the early 2000s that was very poorly received, and it turned out that the company who worked on it only had the mobile phone port of the game to work with because Rockstar hadn't bothered to keep a master copy of the game. There was another recent remake of a game that was very obviously done using a pirated copy of the game as the source, because they hadn't even bothered to remove the cracker's logo from the game.

With examples like that and Sony recently removing thousands of people's access to music and movies that they bought on basically a whim, it's pretty clear that preservation efforts will be done in spite of companies rather than helped by them. And so that means copies of things will be one random harddrive failure of some single person on the internet away from disappearing forever.