longevity

 Longevity  is the goal of keeping your data as future-friendly and future-proof as possible; it is one of the indieweb principles.

If human society is able to preserve ancient papyrus, Victorian photographs and dinosaur bones, we should be able to build web technology that doesn't require us to destroy everything we've done every few years in the name of progress.

Articles and talks

 * 2016-07-02 : "The point of html is to be a resilient long term document format."
 * 2014-10-10 Discussion at CyborgCamp, Networked Mortality (video)
 * 2011 Build conference: 's talk: All Our Yesterdays (video)
 * 2008-10-26 : The Long Web in the inaugural Head conference opening talk
 * 2006-06-17 undefined: Open data formats, longevity, and microformats
 * 2003-03-06 Bert Bos: An essay on W3C's design principles - Longevity
 * 2006-06-17 undefined: Open data formats, longevity, and microformats
 * 2003-03-06 Bert Bos: An essay on W3C's design principles - Longevity

Examples

 * has cited that he has AIM chat logs dating back to 2002, maintained after filesystem and OS changes primarily because they were in html format, while losing much of his older e-mail when he could not get them out of a software that was no longer functional.

Dead Man's Switch

 * Conversation from #indiewebcamp IRC channel
 * http://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2016-04-13#t1460580601691
 * : I'm thinking about a "dead man's switch" after reading Willo Bloo's post "Death and Politcs". The longevity of our personal sites isn’t really a solved problem. And the attempted solutions are definitely not very indie. What I’m thinking about exploring now is a kind of “dead man’s switch” to hand over the keys to some trusted person if I don’t perform some action (click a link, respond to a notification email, etc) in some amount of time. Maybe even spin up a subdomain (or make public an existing subdomain) like memorial. .com or something similar. to make it even easier for whoever to do whatever, but keeps it on our site (sort of).
 * : Google has a thing for that
 * https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive
 * : I don’t trust google to not sunset that feature/product over the course of my life and death.
 * : I keep thinking about a dead man's switch too, but for things other than my website also. Makes me nervous not having a good system for that every time I travel. The best archive of your site is a folder of static assets, which is another thing to consider.
 * : I'm interested in this but have no idea where to start currently. Researching http://networkedmortality.com via the video of the same name (linked above).

Static site domain preservation

 * https://lgbt.io/@nelson/99383650717846720 (archived)
 * "Free business idea: a domain parking service for people who want to retire a website but want to keep it online and out of the hands of SEO spammers. Take a one-time static snapshot of the site when it is parked. Serve that very cheaply as static files. Pay for it either by charging users or by running ads against the domain and its content. Ads will be more lucrative, but obnoxious. Inspired by Matt Haughey's experience here: https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2018/01/19/seo-spammers-wearing-a-printout-of-my-face-as-their-mask/"

IndieWeb trust

 * conversation from #indieweb-dev IRC channel
 * https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2017-07-08#t1499514391211000
 * the most problematic part of indieweb for longetivity is who's going to pay for your domain if you're not?
 * I am not sure every country will allow you to require your heirs to do something in your name. You are better off setting up a trust to do that, who are legally bound by the rules of the trust. A single IndieWeb trust might even work: leave them money and transfer your hosting/domain to the IndieWeb Trust and they keep paying the bills.
 * I am not sure every country will allow you to require your heirs to do something in your name. You are better off setting up a trust to do that, who are legally bound by the rules of the trust. A single IndieWeb trust might even work: leave them money and transfer your hosting/domain to the IndieWeb Trust and they keep paying the bills.

Monument/gravestone hotspots

 * super-local wifi hotspot built on slow decaying hardware, read only, with local website served
 * no DNS/domain issues, local dns server can server domain forever without paying for it

Silo Examples

 * Facebook: Legacy Contact
 * Google: Inactive Account Manager
 * Twitter: manual, via support
 * Github: 'Successor settings' under 'Settings' > 'Account' > 'Successor Settings'



Other Paid/Commercial Services

 * Eternime
 * Eter9
 * Lots of others listed here: http://www.legacy.com/news/culture-and-trends/breaking-news/article/12-apps-for-the-end-of-life
 * Additional services listed here as well: Digital Death and Afterlife Online Services List

Printed Books
Many services exist to allow one to print physical copies (see: books) of online material as mementos for family, friends, and to extend longevity. Given the longevity of many forms of printed matter, this can be a reasonable back up solution, though not as portable digitally. Some services are more tightly integrated into some CMSs to allow quicker physical production.
 * Blog2Print (supports WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Typepad)
 * Pressbooks a plugin that transforms a WP multi-site install into a book production CMS.
 * Pollen (See also, Joel Dueck article above)
 * Lulu is a print-on-demand book service
 * Blurb online publishing service. Blog-to-book product (archived) was discontinued

Vulnerabilities
There are many vulnerabilities to longevity. It makes sense to document them as trends occur.

JS for content
As summarized on 2016-07-02 by : "The point of html is to be a resilient long term document format. Replacing it with nested javascript dependencies is a bad idea. #indieweb"

More: js;dr.

Criticisms of the lack of digital longevity

 * 2017-09-14 Tomorrow matters
 * 2017-10-30 André Staltz: The Web began dying in 2014, here's how
 * https://twitter.com/cogdog/status/1063578020047462400
 * "Agreed; always start / publish at home, everything else is exhaust. I look at content I've made last 8-10 years, lucky if 50% posted elsewhere is alive; my self hosted stuff pushes 99%" @cogdog November 16, 2018
 * https://twitter.com/loudmouthjulia/status/1104475748528738304
 * "YouTube creators, I want to talk to you about why you’re getting your merch site, Patreon page, or discount code URLS tattooed on your bodies. Seriously. DM me. And know it comes from a place of no judgement.!! I have “don’t @ me” tattooed on my body, and want to add my handle." @loudmouthjulia March 9, 2019
 * 2019-10-02 Computer Files Are Going Extinct "The other day, I came across a website I’d written over two decades ago. I double-clicked the file, and it opened and ran perfectly. Then I tried to run a website I’d written 18 months ago and found I couldn’t run it without firing up a web server, and when I ran NPM install, one or two of those 65,000 files had issues that meant node failed to install them and the website didn’t run. When I did get it working, it needed a database. And then it relied on some third-party APIs and there was an issue with CORS because I hadn’t whitelisted localhost. My website made of files carried on, chugging along. This isn’t me saying that things were better in the old days. I’m just saying that years ago websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies."
 * Archivism: immortalitas vel non"The real danger is not time, or technology, or the elements, or phlogiston. The real danger is that the work will fall into the hands of someone with no interest in it – or for whom the effort of understanding the work is overwhelming compared to any potential benefit. When you’re at a secondhand store looking in that shoebox at the counter (or were, in the Before Times), you always wonder what kind of philistine gets rid of family pictures. Well, it could be you. Or me (see above). Or our children. All it takes is for someone to be looking at a collection of random pictures of strangers and to give a shrug of the shoulders. Someone to decide that there is no room for one more photo album. Or no point in renewing a cloud storage subscription. Or that they need that 12tb hard drive for something else. Or they lack the decryption key to open the drive with the files (nota bene: this is coming)."
 * http://www.daniel.industries/2019/02/08/where-do-our-websites-go/
 * thread about link rot & squat: https://twitter.com/zittrain/status/1395750908349325315
 * "With the help of the ace @nytimes digital team, we compiled a list of ~2.2 million externally-facing hyperlinks that had been used in http://nytimes.com articles since its launch in 1996. The goal was to discern how many of them had fallen victim to linkrot or content drift." @zittrain May 21, 2021
 * https://twitter.com/zittrain/status/1395782737966084096
 * "More than half of all articles in the New York Times that contain deep links have at least one rotted link. https://www.cjr.org/analysis/linkrot-content-drift-new-york-times.php" @zittrain May 21, 2021
 * https://twitter.com/zittrain/status/1410224009086709760
 * "Hard to say what’s more worrisome for the preservation of humanity’s knowledge today: the fact that online sources disappear without warning, or that they can be changed without anyone noticing? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/" @zittrain June 30, 2021
 * https://goomics.net/110/

Related Topics

 * https://twitter.com/hashtag/longweb
 * Digital inheritance page at Wikipedia