One thing I always loved in any old sci-fi that dealt with internet-like spaces was that most of them had a concept of a public internet. They generally sort of felt like the "slums" of the internet filled with trash and spam and stashes for hackers, but the concept of a public space to which anyone could post anything always appealed to me. I'm quite sad that we don't have something like this.
We've had plenty of things that had that general appeal, but they've always been owned, run, and eventually shut down, but companies of some sort. I'm not opposed to companies having websites, but I'd love to see a public space as well. The idea that we could post our content to that space and expect it to live far longer than us would be a huge deal.
> One thing I always loved in any old sci-fi that dealt with internet-like spaces was that most of them had a concept of a public internet. They generally sort of felt like the "slums" of the internet filled with trash and spam and stashes for hackers, but the concept of a public space to which anyone could post anything always appealed to me. I'm quite sad that we don't have something like this.
Usenet still exists, and it is definitely filled with trash and spam. There are various projects working on similar sorts of public (or sometimes private but open) spaces without those downsides, it remains to be seen what will end up filling this niche.
um...we still have, like, the internet? You can make some html file, post it on a computer exposed at a port, connect it to the internet, assign it to a static IP, and tell other people the address?
Unless you are specifically referring to someone providing general purpose hosting that you don't need to think about administering — well that isn't a feature of our present-day landscape simply because it wouldn't be a profitable venture given the risks and liabilities from the messed up things people could stash there, along with the inherent costs of admin and hosting.
But if you are willing to set up your own box and procure sysadmin for it, what you suggest exists.
Yes. I also like subways, buses, indoor plumbing, garbage collection, libraries, streets, sidewalks, police, fire safety, postal service, and all sorts of things that we share as members of a society.
Governments around the world have taken way too long to treat internet as a public good (i agree with you).
Especially in america, this country has been running as fast as societally possible in the opposite direction from providing such services as a public good -- so if anything even those libraries and sidewalks are mortal, and at the whims of a political machine idealists may not get to steer.
It sure would be nice if such a thing could exist in stability ad infinatum, but at the same time, there is a small turdy nugget of truth to the american principles of not trusting government with acting in the interests of the people's freedom indefinitely, as has been demonstrated by nations around the world.
We need more grassroots organizations like archive.org supported and run by the people who truly believe in it.
100% agreed with everything you said (and I contribute to archive.org).
Governments won't necessarily get it right, but I would still love to see public efforts toward the goal. Despite recent adjustments, the US postal service has been an impressive slice of government service for a very long time.
What's interesting about this particular goal is that it can easily cross our physical borders. A couple savvy countries can easily team up and get things rolling (or at least throw significant support behind existing efforts)
Check out Arweave: https://www.arweave.org/. It allows for 200-year storage of data, compatible with IPFS. It uses an endowment-funding model to achieve this: arweave.org/technology#endowment
I don’t really see what stops you from having your own site with static content you want to publish. Get a domain for like 10 years, with auto renewal enabled. Get a box somewhere, serve you static content. You can publish whatever you want for almost no maintenance for decades.
(Of course, that’s unless you’re talking about sharing the type of content that would make interpol want to track you down)
Good luck having a VPS 'box' that has an uptime record of 10 years. I know through personal experience that your VPS instance will go down, no matter how much you try to mitigate that. There will be bots and bad actors either trying to DDOS it, or trying to brute force `/wp-admin`.
You could go for some obscure CMS to try and thwart that, but you run the risk of having vulns in that software because it doesn't have the eyeballs of vanilla Wordpress. You could always go for the shared hosting approach but the caveat being: there is no guarantee the shared provider will provide 100% uptime either. (And it will go down at the worst possible moment, like during a HN hug of death)
Your best bet is to have your content distributed and mirrored across multiple services such that any attempt to take it down is impossible. I would go into details about that, but due to op-sec reasons I won't. Tip: Plaster your content all over the web such that a removal of one piece of content does not affect the others.
You're moving the goalpost way further or have a completely different goal in mind than I do.
The only thing that you need if you want to publish content online is an nginx config and a machine with a public internet access. And that's it. No CMS, no wordpress. Almost nobody has a need for 100% uptime so I don't see why you would mention that. If someone wants to DDOS you you have completely different situation and it is very likely your content will be offline, which is fine, no? It's costing them money and the only downside on your side is to not have your publications available for some amount of time. If you're talking about business services, sure, that's a big deal, but for a person sharing their writing, that's a non-issue. It takes what, something like 30 minutes to get another machine, setup nginx, then upload your content?
A $5/month server with debian + nginx serving static content can survive way more than a HN hug of death.
You can even use a box on your home network (or even your router itself with a little elbow grease...) Many routers support popular DDNS providers, and most ISPs don't block port 80 or 443. It may be against your ISPs TOS because they don't want you hammering their upload capacity, but if you put it behind a free-tier CDN that soaks up the spikes (e.g. Cloudflare) then they're unlikely to care. Setting the whole thing up only takes a couple hours (if you're inept like me) and you're in complete control.
And once I'm dead, broke, or have simply moved on from the tech universe?
The ephemerality of the thing is the issue I'm speaking to. We've lost something here.
The requirement for books to last is physical space, and those shelves and boxes continue to exist far longer than the publishers, authors, illustrators, etc. We don't have that with this medium (except, of course, archive.org which is excellent and not nearly enough). We've built something that's lighter than books and easier to store in smaller spaces, but we've [collectively] given no thought to maintaining a proper archive.
The freedom to publish to the world in an instant is as magical as it is fleeting. On a longer scale of time - and not a very long one - it's practically worthless.
IPFS is one way, I believe. Archive.org has been pretty dependable too so you can technically post on Twitter or a blog post then have Archive take a version of it.
I still see your point, though. Maybe mixing in IPFS with some public solution, like a guest book, might be something?
We've had plenty of things that had that general appeal, but they've always been owned, run, and eventually shut down, but companies of some sort. I'm not opposed to companies having websites, but I'd love to see a public space as well. The idea that we could post our content to that space and expect it to live far longer than us would be a huge deal.