Hello, how are you? Do you want a coffee?
Well, I already have in mind that it is more likely for me to die before humanity does than the other way around, but I can't say the same about my digital productions, since they can last as long as the level of redundancy of the servers where they are stored, in addition to being able to be saved, copied, and shared again. If you leave a legacy, people will seek you out or your works if you disappear (Press F for Corium), in these cases it’s good to leave a cherry on top for them.
Leaving an immortal mark in this world is not an easy task; either you create something resilient like a flint tool, or you store it in a safe place like cave paintings - you can also kick the bucket and build a pyramid, being something big that will last for many years, but still, it will turn to dust in the end. Of everything I said, the easiest way I consider is to facilitate the copying and sharing of your digital work, and if possible, spread it across many places that you like or that allow you to achieve this goal. To be more direct, the following article will address the preservation of websites on the web.
To begin, let’s define some parameters that enable our goal: Redundancy, uninterruptedness, simplicity, centralization.
Redundancy, in case the house falls, you already have another one. For example, you have your site on Neocities or some tilde out there; if for some reason of administration, lack of financial resources, or natural disasters, the hosting goes down, how will someone reach your content? Well, a copy of it! It can be a real copy, like having a mirror site, an archived copy on the Wayback Machine, or a link that will download a zip file with your site. Either way, redundancy is related to another thing:
Uninterruptedness, what’s the point of sending several letters if all were sent through wet mailboxes? In other words, it’s useless to have several copies if they are all in environments prone to collapse or destruction. Of course, you can leave a copy in services that seem volatile; after all, one more copy is always good, but leaving all your copies in services that could disappear overnight, or that might delete your data after a while, is not the best option - after all, in that scenario, you would already be dead and your digital immortality would be at risk (and always will be). The best thing to do is to store your copies in services that value keeping them for as long as they can, preferably that never delete your account regardless of how long it has been inactive, or at least archive the content and still keep it available.
Simplicity, congratulations, you managed to host your site on a provider that will preserve it forever! But the CDN for your images, the link to the Bootstrap JavaScript, the MediaFire link to download that 2 MB file stopped working, what now? Many times, it’s tempting to save a little space and bandwidth by passing this task to other services, but if those go down... It’s complicated in certain cases; sometimes the space we have is not much, but certain things are good to keep all together, to make it easier to retrieve. It might be good for you, for example, to have a compressed version in webP of that super cool image, but it will only load if the CDN version is unavailable. Leaving two or more links on different servers for the same file can be a good solution for a while. Another form of simplicity is the way you will provide your site; let’s suppose it will be a zip file (I’m still fixated on this idea), for the person to explore it, they just need to unzip the file and open index.html, or do they need to install Docker, Python, 500 libraries, and also know PHP? If so, will it be easy enough for them not to give up halfway through the process? A thousand years from now, will these technologies still exist (we will never know, maybe yes, maybe no). #simplicity.
Centralization, it’s strange to talk about centralization after discussing redundancy, but in this case, it’s centralization of information, not of data. You have your site and its mirror somewhere else; how will they know that the other site is also yours? How will they even know of the existence of the other site and the other means? Perhaps a bio on the site itself, linking all your networks there, maybe an external bio, like on Cardd, perhaps a business card? There are many possibilities, however... Remember! The other means can always go down someday!
An idea I had is to have a text file called “etern.txt” at the root of your website. The idea is to put all possible links to your other networks there; this is terrible for your OPSEC, but it helps people discover more about you, or you can put these links in the about section... So, why text files? Well, they take up little space, so people can save many of them.
I don’t know what else to say, let’s move on to the conclusions.
Eventually, everything comes to an end; type F before you die:
No solution is infallible.
I’m a bit of a hypocrite, since I myself have never done anything I’ve written about - am I smelling zip files? (it’s a solution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
If you really like something, save it, download it, keep it with you.
Final considerations: If you want to erase everything you’ve done, don’t follow this tutorial. If you want to disappear from the internet, please let us know in advance if possible that you will do this; otherwise, we mere followers will think you’ve died. This moral phrase may be broken someday: once on the internet, forever on the internet.
Goodbye, thank you for reading.
If you want to read anything else, I recommend reading: