The Transitory Nature of Content on the Internet

The transitory nature of things in general is why I've been a big fan of archival since childhood, and why I've become a data hoarder. If there's anything particularly noteworthy or interesting, I try to save it. The amount of genuinely insightful, knowledgeable, or even just entertaining content in the world is staggering, and to me it's worth preserving. But you can't trust online storage because you never know when something like Google Photos will stop being an option.

The lifetime of Internet content is best described as <i>nondeterminable</i>. Some of it lives ... for a long time. Some of it vanishes quickly. Much of it persists until it doesn&#x27;t, whether through the fluke of some small-scale calamity or a wide-ranging service shutdown. Or because the original author, or current hoster, simply feels it no longer warrants being online.<p>Personal blogs, and <i>personal</i> personal blogs, are particularly prone to this. I&#x27;ve been online long enough (going into my fourth decade) that I&#x27;ve seen many people who were at one time quite prolific and free-ranging online ... stop being so. Some died. Some had life catch up with them. Some merely tired of the attention. Some found their interests wandering elsewhere.<p>Archival has value, and I&#x27;m a fan of it.<p>But so do privacy, and peace and quiet.

I think the solution to this lies in peer-to-peer. Accessing content from other users directly from the IP addresses they have been assigned. The internet as used without paid hosting companies and advertising-supported intermediaries (free hosting on social media, or other forms of middlemen). Even IP addresses, i.e., accounts with ISPs, are often transitory over the course of a lifetime, so there is no &quot;perfect&quot; solution. Why store content exclusively with third parties. Store content offline on removable storage. Take it with you from computer to computer, ISP to ISP. Today, it is easier than ever, though maybe not &quot;easy enough&quot;, to share content from home, peer-to-peer. That is, without using a hosting company, social media website, etc. The OP correctly identifies &quot;popularity&quot; as a problem. If you filter all your thinking about the internet through the lens of &quot;popularity&quot; (like Google and Facebook, and the thousands of &quot;tech&quot; wannabes) then you are dead in the water. That is how the &quot;tech&quot; people want you to think. The only content that is important in their world is popular content. Because they rely on advertising to support themselves, that is how they <i>must</i> think. You, the user, do not have to rely on advertising. You do not need to care about popularity. You do not have to be an unpaid content producer for &quot;tech&quot; companies.

If you think that’s transitory, have you seen FaceBook? <i>Twitter</i>? If it’s not from like this week or newer, it’s effectively gone forever, impossible to find again.

<i>We are told that content posted on the Internet lasts forever. This is an oversimplification. While some content can last for decades, nothing is eternal, not even on the Internet. The whole truth is that content survives only as long as some person or organization is willing to pay to host it. Servers, electricity, and network bandwidth cost money. </i><p>Hosting ,electricity, and bandwidth are cheap. it is more likely someone will forget to renew the domain than not be able to afford it.<p><i>What survives is completely dependent upon the values, tastes, and perspectives of the parties hosting it. Much of what the Internet contains has an extremely short shelf-life when compared to the rest of history. </i><p>yeah that&#x27;s cause the stuff you see is the stuff that survived. Most artifact are lost or destroyed.<p><i>For many of us, perhaps for most of us, much of what we post will be more or less hidden in obscurity until it finally disappears forever. And, very likely our most profound insights will have the briefest endurance in a society that seems to value only small ideas, easily digested</i><p>But the consequences of having your stuff be visible can be great and there is no guarantee it will vanish on its own in any reasonable time frame. Mirror repositories can index content long after it has been deleted by the original owner.<p>This person vastly underestimates how permanent the internet is.

<p><pre><code> &gt; I don&#x27;t know why she took down her blog. I hope &gt; it was not because she decided to embrace the &gt; drab adulthood she feared in her teens. </code></pre> I think the author is projecting, and also baselessly attacking the simple, rich, meaningful lives so many people naturally grow into. At this stage in my life, I find more meaning in &quot;doing&quot; the dishes or knocking back a cold one with other dads at soccer practice, than I do writing a &quot;meaningful&quot; blog post as if I&#x27;m some big important nabob like NNT.

If you can forgive the fact that a blockchain is involved, arweave.org offers a credible solution to this.