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by greglindahl 3806 days ago
503, we return the standard 503 code. Remember that most of our users don't know what BitTorrent is, and would prefer that the archive Just Worked.
1 comments

Right! I'm not interested in breaking the Internet Archive, and I'd expect it to move to IPFS [1] eventually (content addressable web) [2]. If/when/how that happens, I'd expect traditional http tooling to still work (curl, wget, etc), which is why I went looking for a status code that indicates an alternate path for the resource/content.

That's why my above comment kept getting edited as I did some more research. 503 is an ugly failure. 429 tells the client to back off, but it doesn't provide a fallback to still get the content. 303 does.

I thought this train of thought was in line with Brewster's blog post [2]. Apologies for the confusion!

[1] https://ipfs.io/

[2] http://brewster.kahle.org/2015/08/11/locking-the-web-open-a-...