[freeflight]

There is a lot to worry about, the modern web has become incredible bad at retention but really good at memory-holing escpecially of old content.

So much more would already be lost without the Wayback Machine.

It's what happens when a place that was supposed to be free and decentralized has become the exact opposite [0]

[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...

[sublinear]

> It's what happens when a place that was supposed to be free and decentralized has become the exact opposite

This is where you lost me. Wayback machine is a centralized repository.

A decentralized system would not have prevented data loss any better without burdening peers with shit they rightfully don't want to host. Nobody wants the cost of hosting anything but their own, and only their own, content.

The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.

[freeflight]

The centralization of the web through a for profit oligopoly is not the same as having a central respiratory of data by a non-profit.

One of those destroyed net neutrality and most online free speech, the other is a charity trying to be the last memorial of it.

> The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.

What about the incentive of keeping a somewhat thrustworthy and complete digital historical record? Is that worth nothing outside of its sheer monetization potential?

Try doing that outside of the FAANG dominance and you have some work cut out for you because they've spent the last decades either buying up any prospective "competition" or straight up marginalizing it into irrelevance.

Which is, to state it again, the antithesis to what the web was supposed to be, it started as a scientific venture [0], it inspired a whole new way of looking at the world and our minds in it [1].

Profit incentives came only later, they were not inherint to this space, they invaded it and took it over.

Yes, I'm romanitizing a lot of idealism here, but I think it's important to remember that era and mindset of the early web.

It's important to remind people that the current web was neither the goal nor has it still much to do with the web of the old, a place of counter-culture, not of corporate mainstream pushing overwhelming government messages while keeping more tabs on you than even the Stasi could ever dream about.

[0] https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

[1] https://www.eff.org/de/cyberspace-independence