Chris Trottier
People say, "The Internet is forever".
This is not true. So much on the Internet has disappeared. I would state further that more has disappeared from the Internet than currently what exists.
This is one reason I wish that a P2P content delivery system was the default: because not only would it deliver information faster, information would depend less on WHERE it is and more on WHAT it is -- thereby creating an avenue for redundancies.
Chris Trottier
Imagine if YouTube was shut down.
It would be a literal tragedy for the human race. Billions of hours worth of creativity would disappear in an instant.
"That would never happen!" some believe.
But it already has.
Remember Google+? All of it's gone forever.
Or remember all that media stored on MySpace? It's vanished.
We must stop depending on Big Tech to archive our data. Their mandate is to profit off our data, not preserve it.
Matthijs De Smedt
@atomicpoet Isnβt IPFS /kind of/ already that?
Chris Trottier
Actually, I kind of wish there was a universal P2P protocol that was a mixture of HTTP and BitTorrent.
That alone would fix so many problems with the Internet!
Chris Trottier
One reason I hope PeerTube takes off is because:
1. It's decentralized
2. It uses a P2P delivery system
That's one step in the right direction -- but I hope other social media networks follow their lead.
Chris Trottier
@anji I've used IPFS for three years, and I've yet to see broad adoption apart from crypto.
If something like archive.org were stored on IPFS, then that would be a game changer.
Leonie :pb:β βοΈβββ :breadified:
@atomicpoet @anji It looks like archive.org is actually planning to use IPFS. Have to look up the source later, currently at work.
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
@atomicpoet stuff disappears off YouTube all the time, and it's often good content like music, recordings of old TV shows that "copyright feds" catch up with, or interesting things like the Bavarian greaser refurbishing and repainting alloy wheels for a modified VW Polo on a home made rig with near 0 PPE and a cig in his mouth, I can't find his channel anywhere (I hope nothing bad happened to him health-wise)
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
@atomicpoet one particularly cursed situation is when rights owners get decades old recordings taken down but won't even release legit sales of the items or have one long deleted DVD release, happens a lot with old British TV shows, particularly those aimed at younger generations (which often have very patchy archives to start with), mostly caused by arguments over rights and repeat fees/royalties..
Chris Trottier
@vfrmedia I feel this on so many levels.
Chris Trottier
@ocdtrekkie That's missing the point.
If YouTube goes down, what happens to the music videos, the animations, the documentaries, the sketch comedy, the video game walkthroughs, etc.?
Like it or not, YouTube has become the place for archiving all audio and video.
Which is why it's also scary that this one site hosts so much data.
On a better Internet, YouTube would be redundant.
Chris Trottier
@ocdtrekkie How?
ocdtrekkie
@atomicpoet I think the amount of conspiracy-laden garbage far outweighs the occasional quality educational video. And many tens of thousands of hours of human consciousness has been completely blown watching Grammarly ads.
ocdtrekkie
@atomicpoet I think the loss of YouTube would be a net positive for the world, tbh.
Vertigo #$FF
@atomicpoet I'm surprised you didn't mention the closest possible analog to your analogy: Google Video.
Chris Trottier
@vertigo I forgot about it. And therein also demonstrates the danger of using Big Tech to archive data.
Santa Claes πΈπͺππ°π
Mikolaj Wielgus
@atomicpoet But in that case how does that differ from what archive.org and archive.today are already doing? What substantial difference would a new protocol provide? You can easily make your client automatically download an archive version of a page if the link dies. And The Internet Archive is mirrored, so it's not a single point of failure either.
Mikolaj Wielgus
@atomicpoet That's why I'd be wary of relying on P2P for archivization purposes as well. A proper archive must survive a complete loss of popularity. Hosting is costly, so seeders that are not committed to doing that (which are the vast majority) tend to disappear with time.
Chris Trottier
@mikolaj This is trueβbut what I'm imagining is dedicated seeders who archive the entire Internet, spread across the world, built for redundancies.
Chris Trottier
@mikolaj The problem with P2P is persistence. But that is also an opportunity waiting to be solved.
Mikolaj Wielgus
@atomicpoet I'd be careful with that. P2P exists for more than two decades, yet never had considerable adoption outside "piracy" and hosting extremely large data (e.g. datasets).
My experience with BitTorrent is that it's definitely slower for small files because it takes some time to find seeders. And accessing IPFS is also slow.
But maybe this will work for video hosting sites, since videos are large files.
Chris Trottier
@calchan My personal well-being isn't the point.
γ«γ«γ‘γγ
@atomicpoet Nothing's forever. You'll be fine.
Noam Preil
@atomicpoet There's not billions of hours of creativity on YouTube. There's a small percentage of *awesomeness*, a slightly larger percentage of goodness, and a vast majority of literal trash.
Though, even if only 1% of it is good, that's still a *lot*. I hope it doesn't disappear, I just think "literal tragedy for the human race" is a *tad* too strong.
Chris Trottier
@pixelherodev But I'm not being hyperbolic whatsoever.
Old Edison recordings are on YouTube.
Films by Andy Warhol are on YouTube.
Jean-Luc Godard's debut film "Une femme coquette" -- long presumed lost -- was available first on YouTube.
That's just the old stuff.
Think about all the new material made for the past 17 years, often by amateur filmmakers, that's *only* available on YouTube.
Further, to say 99% of stuff on YouTube is "trash" is just plain elitism.
Bob Dowling
@atomicpoet
How much time/effort are you prepared to put into preserving your material? It can be preserved, but it takes a little attention on the ownerβs part.
Make a copy / back-up channel of your material on another provider and have a process for copying the entirety of your content from one provider to another. When one of your two goes pop copy onto a third.
*Practice this process.*
(Thereβs a reason armies do drills.)
Reliably storing terabytes of data is HARD.
Chris Trottier
@chidgey Your local backups are the least of my concerns.
chidgey
Matthijs De Smedt
@atomicpoet I also like the aims of PeerTube, but being based on ActivityPub it seems to have some of the same limitations as Mastodon. Lack of global search, discovery, trends, etc. It would be nice to be able to easily search for and discover all content everywhere from any serverβ¦ Thatβs part of what makes YouTube (and Twitter) so good.
Silmathoron
@anji
Do you know there is sepia search for global PeerTube searches?
https://sepiasearch.org/
@atomicpoet
Jonathan Lamothe
Santa Claes πΈπͺππ°π
Chris Trottier
@Jain This isn't about whether creators have back-ups. It's about everyone else having access to a permanent archive.
:blobcathug:
Chris Trottier
@Jain I agree, certain aspects of the Internet should be ephemeral, and that is by design.
But generally speaking *culture* should be archived.
:blobcathug:
Chris Trottier
@Jain I disagree. Ensuring content is available forever is an important goal, and something web developers should work towards.
Just because it's not a reality now doesn't mean it shouldn't be reality in the future.
I've already mentioned one possible way to make archiving the Internet easier. Create a hybrid protocol of HTTP and BitTorrent, have every library on the planet with their own archive.org instance (or something similar).
:blobcathug:
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