Simon Willison
If someone wants to start a blog, and they'd like the content they publish to stick around on the internet for as long as possible into the future, what are their best options?
Buying a domain is tricky because domain names expire
GitHub Pages is pretty great, because GitHub is free and has, to-date, a great track record of not breaking *.github.io content
What are other great options? WordPress.com I think are good on this front
I don't trust anyone with less than 10 years of track record
Claudius
@simon waybackmachine / the internet archive is now the only source for so many things I remember from the early internet. It's very sad.
Simon Willison
I have a hunch that domain names eventually expiring is one of the top causes for blog content to become unavailable in the long (10+ year) term, but I don't have any actual data to back that up, just an intuition - partly based on how many of the things I've linked to from my own blog in the 2000s no longer exist
Simon Willison
I don't trust Medium because they added a paywall / registration wall to content that had previously been published
Substack are too young to have proven themselves as long-term trustworthy stewards of content
I used to trust Twitter for long-term content availability, but then they got bought by someone who clearly doesn't care about that at all (and threads are now hidden behind registration walls)
Mike McCaffrey
@simon @natbat I often think that we need digital columbariums where you can upload your digital content, or those of your loved ones, and it is maintained in perpetuity after you die using an endowment model.
Personally, I would love for some of my photos to keep existing after I am gone.
Simon Willison
Since it's my birthday today, I asked @natbat if she could set me up a non-profit foundation which works as a co-operative where people can pool resources and donate their domain name and cash to keep it maintained (and static files served from it) forever, with a board of directors that appoints their own successors and keeps the thing running in perpetuity without it depending on any single individual
She said she already got me a new watch
Simon Willison
@mikemccaffrey @natbat "digital columbariums" is a fantastic turn of phrase, love that!
MikoΕaj HoΕysz
@simon Whatever you end up doing, ensure you're properly crawled by archive.org in any case. Custom domains help with this, I've seen a platform throw a tantrum over their content being there when they went down and opt themselves out, losing years of valuable community history.
Simon Willison
@Dtl Blogger has been around forever, but Google's track record of keeping things running (even things that have been around forever) is still bad enough that I don't trust it - especially since they seem to have lost interest in further developing Blogger over a decade ago
Dr David Mills
@simon blogger has been around forever.
Dreamwidth?
Santa Claes πΈπͺππ°π
@thattommyhall Oops. My 2010 travel blog is gone then. π
I was selfhosting my main, but wanted something that was easy to update on the go. π
thattommyhall
@simon @Dtl they are retiring old accounts soon, I imagine a lot will drop off then
Santa Claes πΈπͺππ°π
@Dtl Ah, it's still there. It was on a Google account already. I made an update to the main blurb so that the site has been touched for the first time in over a decade.
It did get captured by the Wayback Machine, but you never know. If they shutter blogspot.com they might issue takedowns of historical data For Reasons. I'd better back it up while I have access to the source text.
Dr David Mills
@clacke @simon @thattommyhall
Did it get captured by archive.org?
Eric Scouten
@mfowler @timbray @simon π― agree.
Iβll add to that that using a static site generator (assuming youβre sufficiently geeky to do it) is valuable insurance against any given provider going sideways.
I wrote about my approach here: https://ericscouten.dev/2021/how-i-built-146-parks/ and it now reflects how Iβve built all of my sites.
Martin Fowler
@timbray @simon I'll add a strong +1 to Tim. To really control your long-term material, you need a domain you control. Then you have the maximum flexibility on what tech to use on it.
Tim Bray
@simon I'm still at "buy a domain". It's pretty cheap, and all the respectable registrars will remind you when it's expiring, so hard to lose by accident.
Simon Willison
@mfowler @timbray That's great advice for people who know they're going to continue actively caring about their blog for the long-term, but I'm hoping to find a safe default for people who might get inspired, blog for a few months / few years, then lose interest - but still want the content they write to stay online effectively forever
My hunch is that expired domains are an extremely common reason for personal content to blink out of existence
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