On Jan 30, 2025, at 18:06, dougconstance via groups.io <dougconstance@...> wrote:
Just a thought here on the off-chance that Mr. Duffy might change his mind about having his material preserved:
If Mr. Duffy's material remains static (no new material is posted by him), then preserving the material on a website does not make sense monetarily or administratively. A hosting fee would have to be supported for some indeterminate period, and someone would have to manage such a website to keep it current with changes in PHP, Wordpress, etc.
People always seem to overestimate that. Plain web hosting doesn’t cost much. I’ve had my site up since the 90’s, and it’s not even valuable enough to bother, TBH. I keep thinking I should add a lot more. I don’t mind hosting other things in the space that I’m already paying for, as long as it’s not going to be contentious to do so.
And that’s not even the only way! Some day we will have true peer-to-peer web hosting, so that I share from my home internet connection and it gets mirrored automatically by a lot of other people who have read it, got interested, and want to help share it. This is what I thought the ipfs.tech project was all about, for example, and indeed it can be used for that; but it also seems to have gone in a more commercial direction, with the expectation that most people will pay for hosting their content after all. And the naming problem continues to be kindof a pain. But most of us have broadband at home, right? Way more than enough bandwidth to share some small-scale content with a few thousand friends, as long as they don’t all visit at the same time. So the expectation that hosting costs something extra is just rent-seeking, a result of short-sighted architecture of the web as we know it. And the expectation that it’s ok to publish something valuable and then change your mind and make it all disappear in an instant, is also really bonkers, IMO. When we published on paper, it was impossible. archive.org <> is right to grab everything they can for as long as they can, so that nothing really disappears; but yeah it’s often an incomplete archive. They could be doing it a bit better; and it would be easier if more people were publishing static pages rather than depending on php and databases and JS.
Too bad Mr. Duffy is apparently being a jerk about it. Somebody must have made him mad in some way, for him to react like that.
