Ask HN: Where would you publish content that should outlive you?
I would love for my great grandchildren to be able to read the things I write today, and see the photos I’ve taken.
Where should I publish them?
Dedicated hosting and domain are a missed payment away from being purged.
So is iCloud.
Facebook and Tumblr are a bankruptcy away to join Geocities and MySpace.
Own physical bedroom server requires maintenance which can’t be done when you’re dead.
The average dead person’s content isn’t easy to monetize.
Buy a lifetime sdf.org membership for $36 and publish everything there is the best I can come up with. But that’s predicated on trust.
How would you solve this?
How would you solve this?
This may not be the answer you want but I am skeptical of any website being around for very long. I would get something that can control a chipping and etching tool capable of carving designs and words into extremely hard rock, then find caves that go deep into mountains that are at a high altitude to leave behind whatever was on my mind. The reason I would go for high altitude is plate subduction or ocean level sea rise could submerge some caves at or near sea level. I would avoid soft rock caves and instead try to find very hard rock and mountains that contain massive solid slabs of rock vs. layers of different elements that could easily shatter on impact from asteroids. Some may consider this graffiti however explorers in the distant future may find it interesting. Just like parity data I would repeat my carvings in many caves as some will be destroyed. I would then make videos and pictures of my etchings and upload them to the websites and archives that may be around for a couple decades. This is probably just me, but I would never pay a site to keep something around. Businesses fold every day that were pinky-promised to be around for lifetimes.
Well, it might get super expensive to print it all if you write a lot. The only trustworthy way I have felt 100% safe with is if I type something like a blog post I would want to leave for my son, I just print it out after I have published it and then sew it into a journal that I have started specifically for him. I also sometimes handwrite things like little notes of things he says that I want to keep while I'm living and leave for him to read about and remember the things that made him so precious to me. Sometimes it's a lot of work to put it all together, especially if I just collect the notes, posts and letters and then need to sew or add them some other way to my book. I just cannot bring myself to trust any company knowing what I do about the lengths they go to in order to trick you into paying for things you don't need or things you forgot you signed up for and how unrepentant they are about it. Not to mention all the other problems you mentioned yourself! I'm going to try to remember to come back here and check in on the answers later because I would love to get some advice here as well.
Start an ideology or religion, and make your body of work its sacred text. I think that is your best bet. Even if it dies out, there's a good chance it will be preserved and studied academically.
Either that or write something really good, so people want to read it, so they will keep paying for it to be published over and over again.
I think the first option is actually a lot easier.
this; historically, human minds organized in societies have themselves been the best archivists
we've been able to store information even before being able to write things down! and the methods of recalling the information keep themselves up to date, no need to maintain esoteric codecs
contrast to other species' instincts/learned behaviors, personally i think the ability to only remember the relevant/interesting parts is a feature, not a bug
Print ~10 copies on paper as a book with archive quality paper.
If you are 25 today (2024) you might have adult children in 25 years time; adult grandchildren in another 25 years and great grandchildren 10 years after that (in 2084).
The internet, URL's and websites will be very different by then. Think about the world 60 years ago (1964). This was around the time that 7400 series TTL integrated circuits were released.
How much of your early digital history are still readable today? You might have a box full of 3.5 inch floppy discs but can you still read them.
In short, unless you have a string family history of digital archivists I would only trust paper.
Just make sure to use acid-free paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper
I'd use Familysearch Memories. There are limitations on what you can upload (15mb per PDF or image file), but it's entire purpose is to preserve family history for as long as possible.
https://www.familysearch.org/memories/
It's a service provided by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (of which I'm a member), which considers preserving family history to be a core tenant. To the point of storing family history records in the Granite Mountain Vault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granite_Mountain_(Salt_Lake_Co...)
> a core tenant
tenet:
a principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy.
tenant:
a person who occupies land or property rented from a landlord.
Stone tablets stored in a cave worked reasonably well historically. Alternately print them in a book with archive quality paper and ink and give them out. alternatively creatr a static site with hugo or similar and hand that out to everyone and email a zipped copy as well.
Oh cnc them ibto stainless steel plates. Then they can silk screen them onto paper if they need copies.
https://permanent.org/ is built for this purpose, you can buy service in perpetuity from them. The Internet Archive is another option.
Self-publish a book, and get a library to add the book to their collection.
Libraries will not take self published books very often - I know because I asked them. If they do take it this year, it may well be purged next year. Over the lsat ten years, every library in Australia has had a massive purge.
archive.org, assuming their legal troubles don't take them down. Upload it to there, and ta-da! Body of work. If text, collect it into a book and upload it to LibGen or something also - plenty of shadow sites mirror it. (Yes, it'll be harder to charge for it, but it will probably live on.)
Archival quality CD's are the way to go if it is for your own families use.
For example https://www.verbatim.com/subcat/optical-media/cd/archival-gr...
A great site explaining the differences in discs is https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
> Own physical bedroom server requires maintenance which can’t be done when you’re dead.
How about just putting the things onto a USB disk, or several of them, for redundancy purposes? One hopes JPEG and PDF (or HTML) will be around for another 100 years. No guarantees for USB though, the USB standard might be USB 3.2 Gen 17x69 Rev 42 Type Q in a few years.
Hacker News and GitHub. Your contributions to these platforms are syndicated in datasets like The Pile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pile_%28dataset%29 Stay away from platforms like Reddit that gatekeep your data to extract rents.
Similar discussions from before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36065088
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41584922
> I would love for my great grandchildren to be able to read the things I write today, and see the photos I’ve taken.
Then you need an organization that’s going to care about your writings and photos.
Maybe this is your children and your children are going to then do whatever it takes to maintain your writings and the family photo album just like generations have done.
The only way for things to outlive you is for you to have something that other people want to continue to work on or consume.
That’s literally the only way
If your iCloud account (or whatever) goes abandoned, then a corporation who doesn’t care at all about you is just going to delete your account and all of your information unless you continue to have a commercial transaction with them.
Maintaining a commercial transaction means someone maintains a bank ledger that can support that.
Maintaining a bank ledger that you can support that after you die means that you have some person who is maintaining that managing it maintaining the relationship with the bank, etc…
The writings of Rumi are going to continue to promulgate throughout the Earth, long after Rumi’s death because other people care what they say, and it was encoded in a form and distributed in a way that a lot of people decided to take it
If you cannot create that kind of momentum, then there’s nothing you can do technologically that maintain that
Do something worth doing and it Might be maintained
I’ll give you my personal example of this: I, along with Dave West, Bryce Johnson, Ben Hedges totally re-created 97.7 KAFA the radio station for the United States Air Force Academy from 2006-2008. Prior to me taking over as music Director and later general manager, we had no presence on the Internet. We had no coverage in the Colorado Springs area. We had no formatting. We had nothing structural, we had nothing institutional. Our funding was basically zero and there was no ability for us to maintain or grow.
Over the ensuing 2 1/2 years of work I led a frequency change, widespread marketing, antenna improvement, permanent funding and structured programming. 97.7 KAFA became a permanent and powerful part of the propaganda arm of the US Air Force. That continues and is now maintained and has been maintained for 20 years after I left. It still has the same format. It still uses the same software (NexGen), they have the same segments, they do exactly what the structure is that I put in place.
I haven’t had any input into that since 2008 and it’s thriving: https://www.usafa.edu/radio/
That’s how you create a legacy, hard work, unique determination, and bringing people into a system such that they will maintain it irrespective of your input or not.
If you don’t do that, then nothing you do is going to last
Publish it as a physical book, deposit it with the Library of Congress (or comparable institution in your jurisdiction).
The best I can think of is hosting a static site on the Netlify free tier, i.e. example.netlify.app. Nothing to renew or maintain.
Nothing lasts forever. A few do, however, last for a long time, the best being a few decades, especially in the digital world.
I can guarantee that Netlify [insert other freemium hosting providers] will eventually die sooner than you think.
Honestly I doubt that's the best you can think of. Try harder? Netlify was founded in 2014. That's 10 years ago. They probably won't be around in 2034, let alone 2030. I can almost guarantee it.
For just hosting something as long as possible I would highlight two options stolen blatantly from previous threads:
If you can throw enough money at the problem and are in the US, set up a trust to host your content for as long as the funds last.
If not you could bet on The Internet Archive to outlive you (and maybe donate to them).
But I think the bigger issue than hosting is discoverability. How will your great grandchildren find your content even if it was still available?
To cover both issues the best bet is to focus on somehow convincing your offspring on keeping your content and memory alive in what ever way they see fit, enough so that they pass it on. I have no ideas for exact details here, maybe someone else does?
I would put it on IPFS.
Jokes are fun and all, but we should at least try to answer the question.
Paper.
I think your question is backwards. You need to start the family first then write something to pas on.