[Self-Perfection]

What if government websites were distributed & archived as a default, from the beginning? Think IPFS as a first target for publication, "normal web" only as a mirror.

Is it feasible?

Should we push for this default?

First obvious objection is that lots of government services need backend and dynamic content, but let's say this requirement only goes for static content.

[Gigachad]

What if pedophiles were sent to jail instead of elected.

Technical tricks like IPFS can’t prevent even 1% of the damage caused by giving criminals this much power over society.

[titzer]

The media in the US is utterly feckless and broken.

[tstrimple]

It is owned by capital and doing what they bought it to do. Working as designed.

[NortySpock]

It's difficult to make money if you have to spend all the money on defense lawyers.

Once Trump dies of natural causes I assume some intrepid journalists will go through the mountain of evidence and dig out some exciting snippets of what went on behind closed doors. Maybe a few more people will have to resign because of it.

I'd be interested to hear the contrast between what the Trump Presidential Library considers his greatest accomplishments and what, say, Bob Woodward writes.

[budsniffer952]

Remember when the "crazy far right" went on and on about pedophile conspiracies and the left laughed at them? Good times.

[krapp]

No.

I do remember when they went on and on about how the Democrats and Jews were all Satanic pedophiles and then they elected the King of all pedophiles to stop it. And then they objectively interfered with good faith efforts to police sex abuse for years with false flags and conspiracy nonsense like trying to find a secret entrance to Hillary Clinton's child sex slave dungeon under a pizzeria with a shotgun, and declaring all transgender people "groomers."

A broken clock may be right twice a day, but when it is, it doesn't deserve credit for being a good clock.

[thereforegrin]

wasn't the "dungeon under a pizzeria with a shotgun" stunt a classic red herring as the accusations were actually leveled against the store next door?

I vaguely remember it being along those lines.

[krapp]

I don't think so, but even if that were the case there wasn't a secret Democratic black mass child sex dungeon next door either.

The MAGA folks are trying desperately to say they were right all along when the only pedophiles they didn't see were the ones that were actually real.

[godelski]

Honestly, if anything the library of congress should be operating a system similar to the way back machine. Isn't preserving historical information one of its objectives? And what libraries do in general?

But I'm very in favor of maintaining "the record", as it were, for government websites. If we can have changelogs on bills then we should elsewhere. It informs the citizens of the actions of our government. What has changed and "who done it". That can go both ways and I hope it would incentivize those trying to actually do good and not just treated as a liability.

Hell, if the NSA can just gobble up all the Internet traffic and store it on servers in Utah then the least we can do is make public records accessible. The archival work has already been done and we've already paid for it

[shrinks99]

The Library of Congress runs Webrecorder's Python Wayback for their web archive replay and has an extensive collection of over 35,000 web archives each comprising multiple pages: https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2025/01/beta-release-of-libr...

[godelski]

That's awesome. Thanks for letting me know. It's a great start

[tokai]

Its called legal or mandatory deposit. In some countries their national library is required to crawl the open internet within their language, besides collecting regular published materials. In the US laws on legal deposit has not been extended to non printed materials.

[frogperson]

Your argument assumes the Trump admin wants to actually help the citizens it is supposed to represent. They do not care about most citizens, their words and actions have proven this over and over again.

This admin absolutely will never take any steps towards transparency, education, sharing, or even simple kindness. Any hope of implementing something like this will have to come later.