longevity
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Longevity is the goal of keeping your online presence, data, and code as future-friendly and future-proof as possible; it is one of the indieweb principles.
If human society is able to preserve ancient papyrus, Victorian photographs, and dinosaur bones, we should be able to build durable and resilient web technology that doesn't require us to destroy everything we've done every few years in the name of progress.
Articles and talks
- 2024-09-11 Theresa O’Connor: To remember, or to forget?
- 2018 : The Unbearable Lightness of Web Pages (archived)
- 2016-07-02
Kevin Marks: The point of html is to be a resilient long term document format.
- 2016-06-22 : Digital Life After Death (archived)
- 2014-10-10 Discussion at CyborgCamp, Networked Mortality (video)
- 2011 Build conference:
Jeremy Keith's talk: All Our Yesterdays (video) - 2008-10-26 Jeremy Keith: The Long Web in the inaugural Head conference opening talk
- 2006-06-17
Tantek Çelik: Open data formats, longevity, and microformats - 2003-03-06 Bert Bos: An essay on W3C's design principles - Longevity
Examples
Ben Roberts has cited that he has AIM chat logs dating back to 2002, maintained after filesystem and OS changes primarily because they were in html format, while losing much of his older e-mail when he could not get them out of a software that was no longer functional. [1]- ...
Brainstorming
Dead Man's Switch
- Conversation from #indiewebcamp IRC channel
Shane Becker: I'm thinking about a "dead man's switch" after reading Willo Bloo's post "Death and Politcs". The longevity of our personal sites isn’t really a solved problem. And the attempted solutions are definitely not very indie. What I’m thinking about exploring now is a kind of “dead man’s switch” to hand over the keys to some trusted person if I don’t perform some action (click a link, respond to a notification email, etc) in some amount of time. Maybe even spin up a subdomain (or make public an existing subdomain) like memorial.<site>.com or something similar. to make it even easier for whoever to do whatever, but keeps it on our site (sort of).- Kevin Marks: Google has a thing for that
- https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive
- Shane Becker: I don’t trust google to not sunset that feature/product over the course of my life and death.
Aaron Parecki: I keep thinking about a dead man's switch too, but for things other than my website also. Makes me nervous not having a good system for that every time I travel. The best archive of your site is a folder of static assets, which is another thing to consider.
gRegor Morrill: I'm interested in this but have no idea where to start currently. Researching http://networkedmortality.com via the video of the same name (linked above).
Static site domain preservation
- https://lgbt.io/@nelson/99383650717846720 (archived)
- "Free business idea: a domain parking service for people who want to retire a website but want to keep it online and out of the hands of SEO spammers. Take a one-time static snapshot of the site when it is parked. Serve that very cheaply as static files. Pay for it either by charging users or by running ads against the domain and its content. Ads will be more lucrative, but obnoxious. Inspired by Matt Haughey's experience here: https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2018/01/19/seo-spammers-wearing-a-printout-of-my-face-as-their-mask/"
IndieWeb trust
- conversation from #indieweb-dev IRC channel
Peter Molnar the most problematic part of indieweb for longetivity is who's going to pay for your domain if you're not?- ...
Martijn van der Ven I am not sure every country will allow you to require your heirs to do something in your name. You are better off setting up a trust to do that, who are legally bound by the rules of the trust. A single IndieWeb trust might even work: leave them money and transfer your hosting/domain to the IndieWeb Trust and they keep paying the bills.
Monument/gravestone hotspots
- super-local wifi hotspot built on slow decaying hardware, read only, with local website served
- no DNS/domain issues, local dns server can server domain forever without paying for it
Silo Examples
- Facebook: Legacy Contact
- Google: Inactive Account Manager
- Twitter: manual, via support
- Github: 'Successor settings' under 'Settings' > 'Account' > 'Successor Settings'
Other Paid/Commercial Services
Posthaven
https://posthaven.com and https://posthaven.com/help#archive-mode
Our pledge
We'll never get acquired. We'll never shut down. You pay, we keep the lights on.
Posthaven is a long-term project that aims to create the world's simplest, most usable, most long-lasting blogging platform. We don’t have investors, show ads, or even take salaries. Posthaven is designed to outlive us, and that’s the goal behind everything we do.
WordPress 100 Year Plan
Others
- Eter9
- Lots of others listed here: http://www.legacy.com/news/culture-and-trends/breaking-news/article/12-apps-for-the-end-of-life
- Additional services listed here as well: Digital Death and Afterlife Online Services List
Printed Books
Many services exist to allow one to print physical copies (see: books) of online material as mementos for family, friends, and to extend longevity. Given the longevity of many forms of printed matter, this can be a reasonable back up solution, though not as portable digitally. Some services are more tightly integrated into some CMSs to allow quicker physical production.
- Blog2Print (supports WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Typepad)
- Pressbooks a plugin that transforms a WP multi-site install into a book production CMS.
- Pollen (See also, Joel Dueck article above)
- Lulu is a print-on-demand book service
- Blurb online publishing service. Blog-to-book product (archived) was discontinued
- ...
Vulnerabilities
There are many vulnerabilities to longevity. It makes sense to document them as trends occur.
JS for content
As summarized on 2016-07-02 by Kevin Marks:
More: js;dr.
Criticisms of the lack of digital longevity
- 2017-09-14
Manton Reece Tomorrow matters - 2017-10-30 André Staltz: The Web began dying in 2014, here's how
- https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1063578020047462400
- "Agreed; always start / publish at home, everything else is exhaust. I look at content I've made last 8-10 years, lucky if 50% posted elsewhere is alive; my self hosted stuff pushes 99%" @cogdog November 16, 2018
- https://twitter.com/loudmouthjulia/status/1104475748528738304
- "YouTube creators, I want to talk to you about why you’re getting your merch site, Patreon page, or discount code URLS tattooed on your bodies.
Seriously. DM me. And know it comes from a place of no judgement.!! I have “don’t @ me” tattooed on my body, and want to add my handle." @loudmouthjulia March 9, 2019
- "YouTube creators, I want to talk to you about why you’re getting your merch site, Patreon page, or discount code URLS tattooed on your bodies.
- 2019-10-02 Computer Files Are Going Extinct
The other day, I came across a website I’d written over two decades ago. I double-clicked the file, and it opened and ran perfectly. Then I tried to run a website I’d written 18 months ago and found I couldn’t run it without firing up a web server, and when I ran NPM install, one or two of those 65,000 files had issues that meant node failed to install them and the website didn’t run. When I did get it working, it needed a database. And then it relied on some third-party APIs and there was an issue with CORS because I hadn’t whitelisted localhost.
My website made of files carried on, chugging along. This isn’t me saying that things were better in the old days. I’m just saying that years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.
- Archivism: immortalitas vel non
The real danger is not time, or technology, or the elements, or phlogiston. The real danger is that the work will fall into the hands of someone with no interest in it – or for whom the effort of understanding the work is overwhelming compared to any potential benefit. When you’re at a secondhand store looking in that shoebox at the counter (or were, in the Before Times), you always wonder what kind of philistine gets rid of family pictures. Well, it could be you. Or me (see above). Or our children. All it takes is for someone to be looking at a collection of random pictures of strangers and to give a shrug of the shoulders. Someone to decide that there is no room for one more photo album. Or no point in renewing a cloud storage subscription. Or that they need that 12tb hard drive for something else. Or they lack the decryption key to open the drive with the files (nota bene: this is coming).
- http://www.daniel.industries/2019/02/08/where-do-our-websites-go/
- thread about link rot & squat: https://twitter.com/zittrain/status/1395750908349325315
- "With the help of the ace @nytimes digital team, we compiled a list of ~2.2 million externally-facing hyperlinks that had been used in http://nytimes.com articles since its launch in 1996. The goal was to discern how many of them had fallen victim to linkrot or content drift." @zittrain May 21, 2021
- https://twitter.com/zittrain/status/1395782737966084096
- "More than half of all articles in the New York Times that contain deep links have at least one rotted link. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/linkrot-content-drift-new-york-times.php" @zittrain May 21, 2021
- https://twitter.com/zittrain/status/1410224009086709760
- "Hard to say what’s more worrisome for the preservation of humanity’s knowledge today: the fact that online sources disappear without warning, or that they can be changed without anyone noticing? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/" @zittrain June 30, 2021
- https://goomics.net/110/
Related Topics
- https://twitter.com/hashtag/longweb
- Digital inheritance page at Wikipedia
IndieWeb Sessions
- Analog Meets Online: 2022 popup session
- Here Today, Gone Tomorrow at IndieWebCamp West 2020
- Building for the Long Web at IndieWeb Summit 2016
See Also
- principles
- archival
- book
- zombie
- 1990s
- 1980s
- 2017-06-09 Brewster Kahle Collector or Digital Librarian?
- An ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry (paper)
- https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1059179386815959040
- "Anyone know of a web hosting provider where I can pay a lump sum of money to host a file at a reliable URL essentially forever? Is this even remotely feasible?" @simonw November 4, 2018
- Tweeting for 10,000 Years: An Experiment in Autonomous Software; can Tweets be scheduled on a multi-year period?
- 2019-03-03 Delete Never: The Digital Hoarders Who Collect Tumblrs, Medieval Manuscripts, and Terabytes of Text Files
- 2019-04-10 The Guardian UK: 'Extraordinary' 500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time
Because Colón collected everything he could lay his hands on, the catalogue is a real record of what people were reading 500 years ago, rather than just the classics. “The important part of Hernando’s library is it’s not just Plato and Cortez, he’s summarising everything from almanacs to news pamphlets. This is really giving us a window into the entirety of early print, much of which has gone missing, and how people read it – a world that is largely lost to us,” said Wilson-Lee.
- 2019 The American Archivist: Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation (complete paper as a PDF)
- https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
- https://chloeweil.com/blog/our-ragged-history/index.html
- “I decided that for the sake of our future generations we should document exactly how to process today's documents, so that when they look back, they can still reimplement HTML browsers and get our data back”
- Ian Hickson, 2007 http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-February/009517.html
- Want to Write a Book? You Probably Already Have! by Patrick Rhone, a video from Micro Camp 2021 about the philosophy of converting one's blog into book formats. He touches on some of the how with a Mac perspective, but the focus here is more on why.
- 2021-11-03 The Guardian: What does tech take from us? Meet the writer who has counted 100 big losses / We have never been more reliant on the internet – yet Pamela Paul still gets DVDs in the post and buys CD players.
- “Legacy Contacts” is an iOS 15.2 beta feature: 2021-11-10 iOS 15.2 beta introduces nearby AirTag searches and Legacy Contacts
… to designate people as Legacy Contacts, who'll be able to access their account and digital information when they pass away
- https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/archiving-a-website-for-ten-thousand-years/482385/
- https://internet-in-a-box.org/
- 2022-03-02 Write plain text files
I’ve brought my text files with me since 1990, from Mac to Windows to Linux to BSD, from PCs to laptops to tablets to Android to iOS to a tiny device the size of my thumb, and back again.
- https://twitter.com/benward/status/144855762836013056
- "@arielwaldman The embed code is a
containing the Tweet content. If it's deleted, or 1000 years in the future, the text remains." @benward December 8, 2011
- "@arielwaldman The embed code is a
- https://twitter.com/voxpelli/status/1471162793739141125
- "Longetivy is also a core principle there https://indieweb.org/principles, and blockchains have no proven longevity whatsoever + previous attempts at federated social networks (identica / statusnet / OStatus) are also lost.
Ones personal sites, ones indie presence, is still there though" @voxpelli December 15, 2021
- "Longetivy is also a core principle there https://indieweb.org/principles, and blockchains have no proven longevity whatsoever + previous attempts at federated social networks (identica / statusnet / OStatus) are also lost.
- Brainstorming: add to domain preservation — a "Zombie Defense Fund", chip in and keep a domain registered, redirecting its permalinks to Internet Archive equivalents.
- "Writing an app is like coding for LaserDisc"
The web has none of that. The earliest websites are viewable on modern browsers3. Sure, sometimes they might render in unexpected ways. And you might hope the servers they run on have been updated with security patches. But a website from the 1990s still works three decades later.
- 2022-09-17 The Guardian: Will today’s tech giants reach a century? It’s all about the quality of the product / If you want to be an internet-age version of General Motors or IBM, you need to sell something people want and steer clear of political pitfalls
- https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1574546784365445136
- "The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss - an unequalled achievement. 1/" @incunabula September 26, 2022
- https://twitter.com/aardrian/status/1587425876681129986
- "With Twitter accounts & tweets disappearing on the daily now, remember when you embed tweets in your posts and articles to account for this:
• fix t•co links;
• embed the media;
• compress the media;
• add or use existing alt text;
• captions!
More:
https://adrianroselli.com/2021/01/bulletproofing-embedded-tweets.html" @aardrian November 1, 2022
- "With Twitter accounts & tweets disappearing on the daily now, remember when you embed tweets in your posts and articles to account for this:
- https://me.dm/@anildash/109756013657292019
- "relevant to my post last night that I'm going back and fixing up my 23 years of blog archives, and restoring broken links, it is *astounding* how much better a job the personal web does at keeping links alive and content online. Most personal blogs I linked to are either still around or redirect to a place where the content is easy to find. The vast majority of corporate content (including news) has been erased, with only imperfect Internet Archive copies available." @anildash January 26, 2023
- Interesting institutional example for blogs: 2023-10-02 Preserving Harvard’s Blogging History
The Harvard Blogs multisite consisted of around 1,500 blogs. To move it over, we systematically migrated the archive to our servers and then upgraded the network to the latest version of WordPress
- How can we keep domains working long after our death?
Terence Eden: 2021-01-26 The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML- 1998-11-28 NNG: Web Pages Must Live Forever
- https://book.micro.blog/permanence/
- https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/
- 2023-07-01 File over app
File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.
- The opposite of longevity: 2024-05-17 When Online Content Disappears / 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later
- Pluralistic: Linkrot (21 May 2024)
- Why / IG longevity failure: 2024-10-06 Slate: The Sinister Reason Why Instagram Keeps Erasing Your Memories / The latest glitch erased users’ archived Stories, reminding us how fragile our digital memories are—and how little Big Tech really cares about preserving them.