[jacquesm]

What are the rough operating costs of posterous?

If you want we could discuss keeping it alive rather than shutting it down (like what I've been doing with http://www.Reocities.com/).

I don't like large gaping holes in the web.

[nikcub]

Instead of setting up a longer living backup for each case, it would be interesting to setup a generic storage mirror and a corporate foundation that can keep these sites alive.

When a startup shuts down a product, they can donate the domain name or point it to the mirror to keep it alive.

Something like archive.org, with some donated servers and a couple of people working on it.

Twitter and other acquirers usually only want the team, and this is happening more and more. We are losing large parts of the web. I wouldn't be surprised if less than 1% of Posterous is exported and goes to live on in other forms. Either way the URLs and links all die.

[jacquesm]

I've been keeping reocities alive out of pocket. It costs a few hundred every month in hosting costs and another few hundred in machine write-offs. I got about .37 in bitcoin donations, so I'm a bit short still :) But I think it is well worth doing. I assume hosing posterous would cost a lot more than that so I'd have to find some funding but I'm pretty sure this could be done.

[nikcub]

I'd be more than happy to help out if Twitter are willing to do it with Posterous. Register a non-profit and then go out and approach some of the larger co's for funds and/or resources to keep it running forever.

Make static backups of these sites using their sitemaps[0] and then ask them to donate or point their domains

[0] https://posterous.com/sitemap.xml (warning: 1.5MB)

[jacquesm]

Hm, that sitemap seems to be limited to 10K entries and it isn't clear how it links to the next level sitemap. I'll get to work on this.