[lazyjeff]

I've been working on a similar system for a while called irchiver [https://irchiver.com/] but what I wanted from the start is for everything to be local and plain formatted, i.e. stored as .txt and .webp to be most accessible.

Coincidentally, I've only been building for Windows, so different from the platforms supported by Rewind. If anyone wants to collaborate, I'd be very open to it.

[AJ1998]

would love to hear more about this!

[lazyjeff]

So I was thinking about how the web is not as permanent as it used to be. Between walled gardens, and dynamic content, it's hard to find things you saw. So I wanted a way to have a screenshot-based "archive.org" but for yourself, so that it works with non-public content too like a Facebook post or if it disappears like all the stuff on Google+.

Philosophically, I think almost everything we see and think about is in a web browser these days. Even private conversations with my friends, I often look up a few things about them. So I've been using irchiver myself to dogfood it, for almost 2 years now. And found it to be super useful already. For example, I've recovered important technical posts that someone deleted, paragraphs on text I lost when submitting a form that didn't save, or found a comic strip that I had at the tip of my tongue but got lost in google search.

And I think it's now possible because of strong+efficient screenshot compression and good OCR. There's an undocumented Win32 hack that lets you capture window content in a fast way (moreso that a typical BitBlt) so I used that to grab the images. And made a standard inverted index search engine for the content. Anyways, the webpage I put up for the project explains it as best as I can to a general audience [https://irchiver.com/].

In many ways, it's like the Rewind startup here. Except it just happens I did it for Windows, and they did it for MacOS and iPhone. And I care a lot about local storage of the original screenshots and text. Would love to hear others' thoughts.