idk if I'll really participate in website league, but I cosigned their manifesto because I think it's important to build as much stuff in the indie web as possible.

it's long been my opinion that certain people can only be comfortable in certain places, and that applies to social media. not everything has to be on the same network or infrastructure. hell, some people don't even want to be on the internet at all, and that's fine

@suricrasia tangential, what are your thoughts on lifetime of things on the web? A lot can be said for the transient nature of a lot of the web, but even when people want to preserve it seems a difficult goal

@violator I'd say the half life of most things is 5 years, and then you need to start hunting and asking around. some things will last longer, some shorter.

imo I think we should approach the internet with the assumption that it is all transient. save what's important to you. that's how it's always worked—even libraries destroy old and unpopular books.

@suricrasia sure, and I agree with all those points, but should we strive to change those aspects? It's how it's always worked, but does it make sense to struggle against that not-so-intentional tradition?

@violator it really depends, but I don't think the status quo for social media is too bad. people worry a LOT about lost media—far more than I think is warranted. especially when that idea is applied to communication. not everyone wants everything they've ever said to be remembered forever. I don't know if they are still around, but there were masto instances which would delete a user's posts after a configurable delay.

any infrastructure designed to "make things permanent" has to grapple with a person's desire—perhaps right—to be forgotten. indeed, mass amounts of archived data of people's interpersonal communications can have bad externalities when, say, an authoritarian government has access to it.

if we're going to talk about preservation, I think what's more important is news media either being lost or not easily searchable. there have been many times where I wanted to find an old article on something and been completely unable to. that has more of a material impact on me as a citizen

@suricrasia @violator i'm not quite sure how to tie into this but also, like, software
software's way more susceptible to degradation than a lot of media, a lot of the time
and like, twofold degredation where the stuff that isn't maintained eventually stops working and the stuff that is maintained gains new features and changes until its unrecognizeable
and sometimes that's for the best? but sometimes not?

(i've been using some software that hasn't appreciably changed since i was a kid and that's a result of decades of active maintenance lmao)

idk none of this is coherent, and some of it cuts dangerously close to Discourse i'm too tired for

@alterae @suricrasia yeah, no worries, all makes sense, no risk of Discourse here. I just wonder what can be done to help alleviate the situations that fall into your "sometimes not" category where the public (for some definition) would appreciate having access long term

@violator @suricrasia i mean with open source projects like GNOME sometimes you get MATE because enough people with the ability to do so care enough to maintain a normal desktop environment for the next thirteen years

but that's a bit of a special case i think, and if it's something like discord ur fucked

(i do think one thing that _should_ have some kind of preservation project is firefox)

@violator e.g. I have a distinct memory of an MP in our house of commons—around the time they were trying and failing to do voting reform—saying that canadians "don't care" about some particular mathematical metric of democracy. I've tried multiple times and I can't find a source of this fact

@suricrasia right, and it's more that latter point I was getting at, things intended to be resources as opposed to personal communications, or other intentionally transient matter. Like an example where some specific domain calculators were hosted on a university faculty page, and then they changed the setup taking those resources offline. The original publisher didn't have tools to provide high availability, but I like to think they would have used them if they could. They were very useful and now the only equivalents I have found since were in floppies in the back of a textbook from the 90s.

@violator yeah, that's a good point. perhaps as the internet has aged it has become so "social media-y" that it takes up so much of the infrastructural "air in the room" as it were, leading to more useful resources to fall by the wayside, or only being able to exist from within the social media ecosystem. I guess my answer to that is the evergreen "make your own website" which is, I know, not the most actionable advice

@alterae firefox has like five different forked projects (pale moon, waterfox, librewolf, gnu icecat, basilisk) so I don't think there's a risk of it dying out, but also some important firefox forks like tenfourfox have been halted so yeah there's always a risk

@suricrasia yeah, write your own book, record your own media. It's a super open ended 'thing to think about' that won't be solved in a day but i always appreciate the replies. IPFS was exciting initially but not exactly a great solution as far as I can tell now for a few different reasons

@violator I would say that the "make your own website" imperative is not intended to mean "make a website to fix everything" but rather "make a website so that the thing you specifically find important has a place to live outside the social media ecosystem."

I suppose a more sustainable way would be to come up with some kind of non-social media system for sharing information. very tricky to think about

@suricrasia library science people, what secrets are they hiding, why are they keeping them from me

@violator you need to learn dewey's decimal

@vn i mean less to prevent the browser from dying out and more "i want a browser with a modern browser engine and a ui that's actually good" (mozilla stop adding extraneous buttons to the toolbar that can't be removed without about:config challenge)