Ask HN: Where to put a static page that would last forever

54 points by DanielBMarkham 1 year ago | 93 comments

As I get older, I've decided to write physical books. I want something of a legacy for after I leave.

In the back of the book, I'd like to put a 2D barcode to send folks to a static webpage somewhere, maybe for further information, an update, text changes, etc.

But where would that go? If I buy a domain I've got to renew it every year. Same goes for AWS static page hosting. I thought about using my GitHub account, but each year they keep screwing around with keys and logins and whatnot. I'm sure that most all of these places I'm using will delete both my account and data after a certain number of years of inactivity.

So where do I put a static webpage I can link to and be assured (mostly) that it'll be around 100 years or more from now?

crazygringo 1 year ago |

Just put it on your own domain and keep it there while you're alive. Renewing it is not that hard, especially with auto-renew on a credit card.

And make sure the Internet Archive indexes it. When people find old links that don't resolve anymore, IA is where they go.

Don't overthink this. Nothing lasts forever, but right now I'd say IA is the most likely repository to survive over the longest term, certainly in comparison to any for-profit company.

dingaling 1 year ago | |

> Just put it on your own domain and keep it there while you're alive

There is really no "for as long as you live persistent hosting"

Self-hosting: ISPs change, people move house, power black-outs take servers offline

Hosted: providers change policies, are bought out, go bust, payment details change

crazygringo 1 year ago | | |

Sure but the amount of maintenance for hosted is pretty small, if you pick the right host.

If you use something like Google Sites with your own domain, which is used by a lot of paying corporations, there's a good chance you'll never need to touch it again until you die, except for using some credit card information maybe.

paulyy_y 1 year ago | |

IA has been under attack and has gone down for weeks recently. At this point it's a bit silly to place much faith in it as a perpetual store.

crazygringo 1 year ago | | |

That being said, it's still more likely to stay accessible over the long-term than anything else.

Seeing as that's its mission and it's got the longest track record of it.

Any even if it fails someday as an organization, its repository is the one most likely to be maintained by a new organization with the same mission.

gmuslera 1 year ago |

100 years is too long. Maybe not because the company or institution where you will host it directly or indirectly will vanish (the Lindy effect matters choosing one), but because we, as internet and its users, moved on. The changes are accelerating, in the last very few years AIs are being used as search engines and providing content, new generations doesn't read so much (as they consume things like Instagram or TikTok), and that is a relatively recent development.

You may still find user pages on universities that goes back to the early 90's, before that simply there was no web, and that was just 30 years back, 10 years earlier was the start of TCP/IP, mail and DNS protocols. But 20 years later from now things may be very different to what we know so far.

Maybe it would be for the better to ride the waves, and instead of doing things like we did till a few years back, rely on AIs or other systems that will hold that knowledge somewhat and that can be interacted with. And hope that where you put the today's style static web page with your book addendum gets indexed by them and used when the consumer of the content you created request it somehow.

appplication 1 year ago | |

Indeed, I would be very surprised if the concept of visiting a webpage is even a thing in 100 years. Perhaps in some archival sense, but I really do not think the average person will have any experiences accessing any variation of “somewebsite.com” at all.

You cannot fight change, and you cannot fight your own impermanence. And so what if it does last 100 years, then what? Should it last 200? 1000? 1,000,000? Just be, and be happy. Live, laugh, love is wiser advice than you’d think.

xk_id 1 year ago | |

You might find this perplexing, but trust me when I say that the kind of legacy that needs to endure centuries, and VC wet dreams like AI are totally disjunct domains.

fragmede 1 year ago | |

> 100 years is too long.

The Long Now Foundation would like to have a word.

mkl 1 year ago | | |

The Long Now Foundation has existed for less than 30 years. They have some lofty goals, but they're just goals.

generalizations 1 year ago |

Ultimately you have to give a human direct responsibility for it; or in your case, a series of humans.

I'd suggest you do buy a domain, but set up a legal/financial framework so that a long-standing law firm will keep up the payments for N decades (or for as long as the firm & its successors exist).

kylebenzle 1 year ago | |

This is exactly the wrong advice, instead put your data on the blockchain, preferably Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum.

"Free" data storage for as long as the internet exists.

Make the barcode to your transaction with the data, anyone with a brain and time can figure it out from there.

lylejantzi3rd 1 year ago | | |

What generalizations suggests is what people have been doing successfully for hundreds of years to maintain things much more complicated than a website (a multi-generational family estate, for example). What you're suggesting has never been tried for any period of time. Tell me again how his advice is wrong and yours is right?

yawpitch 1 year ago | | |

> "Free" data storage for as long as the internet exists.

Oh ye of so much faith.

RiverCrochet 1 year ago | | |

? "Free" data storage for as long as the internet exists.

The big blockchains are robust, but I'm wondering if it's not impossible for them to not need the full blockchain at some point.

explorigin 1 year ago | | |

Whether its right or wrong advice depends on GPs audience.

kjellsbells 1 year ago |

Your problem isnt so much "content storage" as it is "addressing". For example, you could carve the info into a rock, and instruct an immediate descendent to maintain it, and have them tell their children, etc. Or create a religion that maintains The Rock.

But lets imagine you found a crystalline web server that ran off sun light and was backed by rock storage. Who is to be assured that the https scheme will still exist in 100 years? Or that DNS is still the resolution method? FTP had a 20 year run before dying. Gopher lasted under a decade. Http is dying out under the weight of security and corporatization. Even DNS is under pressure to be centralized and otherwise fiddled with in the name of convenience (eg locality). So your descendents might not be able to resolve your URN locator scheme, or have a usable client to reach it, no matter how good your long term storage is.

xyzzy123 1 year ago | |

Quietly create a retrovirus which will write your data into the DNA of every living human.

dd_xplore 1 year ago | | |

Future of Ad companies!

simne 1 year ago |

100 years is too long time. Modern science don't know, how to make something, which will exist so long. This is because, even when we could make machine which will work so long, nobody could guarantee existence of jurisdiction where machine will be. And to move machine to other place will need some people, but people active lifetime is much less.

For this problem, even Darpa created special research program and at the moment only exists one serious applicant - https://100yss.org/

You could try to ask some of Japanese oldest organizations to host your page, as they have few entities existing hundreds years. But you should ask not one but few, I think at least 3, because just few years ago bankrupted 700-years old Japanese bank.

Other possible candidates - some churches and property communes in Western countries. But also, each additional host will just make higher probability but will not guarantee anything.

Also possible to ask your family to save your site, but even if your family is reliable enough, who knows, how will look like society in 100 years, and if your book/site will be legal.

I think, if you will place something on Moon, exists high probability nobody will reach it in 100 years (I think, large share territory of Moon will be desert like now), so it will save. And yes, it is possible to make laser communication system, so somebody could buy components for some reasonable cost and make call and receive data from your site there.

mwedwards 1 year ago |

If you are willing to relinquish copyright claims on your work, for example by including a copyleft statement in the book’s preface, an organization like Project Gutenberg may be willing to host it, ostensibly in perpetuity. Other considerations are whether the book can stand alone as text-only, or will it rely on additional media to convey its message to the reader?

More about Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.org

DanielBMarkham 1 year ago | |

Just to clarify, I'm asking where to host a static page that would be a modified introduction, addendum, errata, "if you like this try these", "The author died by wooden badger attack", etc

Not the entire book. I wouldn't have to copyleft the entire thing, right?

My current static page is just an "I like this book, please give me this free thing and put me on a mailing list" kind of thing. But that's not really the point. The point is "how can I use static pages, presumably the thing the internet was built for, to put a few pages of extra material on the book and perhaps give links for folks to follow if they're interested in the topic?"

Traditionally, you'd issue a new edition with such information, but that seems like a hella work and expenditure, and small stuff like this should be the kind of thing you'd be able to stick somewhere online, if nothing else as a parking spot until you eventually publish a new edition.

I wonder if the Internet Archive would be interested in this kind of archival.

cxr 1 year ago | | |

Traditionally, the answer would be "Use PURLs". The Internet Archive happens to operate the purl.org resolver.

Unfortunately, with the recent attack, the purl.org resolver went offline and remains so. All the purl data is still there and is accessible to the public, you just don't get resolvable URLs for them.

Nowadays, it seems like ARKs are the better way to go, anyway, and the attack on archive.org proved it perfectly. Look into <https://arks.org/>

(The Internet Archive mints ARKs for every item uploaded to its collections. You may have noticed them in the infobox below the fold when looking at a given item.)

As for your latter remarks, the Internet Archive will take just about anything. Create an account and start uploading. Ted Nelson has a huge chunk of his papers on there.

DamonHD 1 year ago | |

That's approximately my approach with a CC BY 4.0 / Apache 2.0 / CC0 licence and uploading to Zenodo / Dryad and getting an official DOI.

Possibly even some useful legitimate fodder for those fashionable AI data sinks!

monster_group 1 year ago |

Nothing lasts forever. Even 100 years is a very long time given the technology / cultural / legal changes. It's futile to try to come up with an eternal solution. Just host it on something that seems to be reliable / stable for the foreseeable future and tell the younger generation to migrate it after you are gone to whatever tech of their day is going to be. If the younger generation does not care to migrate your work, then it is not of value to their generation and it is OK for it to fizzle out. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it is probably best to have realistic expectations about how much people would care about your work after you are gone.

wturner 1 year ago |

Travel to a secluded part oft he world with plenty of sunshine. Bury a time capsule containing a Rasberry pi with a long antenna and solar panel sticking out of the ground behind a big pile of shrubbery.

datadrivenangel 1 year ago | |

Be careful about storage. A lot of SSD/Flash storage may not be recoverable if it's powered down for long periods of time.

nirav72 1 year ago | |

The solar panel will eventually require cleaning.

kevinios 1 year ago |

Just a suggestion, and I suspect I might have overlooked some drawbacks: what about hosting it on SEVERAL of those websites/platforms/services/communication systems (probably with a version "number" or a last updated date), and inside the book, provide several backup links, in case the first one was dead by the time they visited it?

Basically spreading the risk to maybe 10 platforms instead of 1, hoping that at least 1 always survives.

One issue would be that if you lose the login access to one of those platforms, their content might be deprecated on that page, and more recent content would be displayed on others. But that might be a small enough problem to ignore it. You could also encourage readers to visit 2-3 of the links, instead of 1, to increase the chances they read the one with the most recently updated content.

And/or maybe each of those pages could embed a system that "fetches" the status of the other 9 pages, and display the version number of the content of each of them, so that the reader can navigate to other pages if they see that another one has more recently updated content.

And/or you (the author) could manually have to go on the 10 pages every month/year and "confirm" that the content is still up-to-date. Each page would display: "the author has last confirmed the validity of this page on date X". This stops working after you pass away, though, but since all pages would show the same last confirmed date, that might be ok. You could also add a warning on those platforms: "If you see that I haven't confirmed the validity of the content in more than X months, I have either lost access to this page or passed away. Please check some of the other links from the book to see if their "last confirmed by author date" is the same, and if so, please try and check online whether I have passed away".

In any case, a fun problem to think about, thank you!

dzhiurgis 1 year ago | |

This.

If you setup multiple domains or url shorteners, each can redirect to whatever free platform is available (facebook groups, reddit, github, web.archive, etc). It does require a bit of maintenance tho.

TekMol 1 year ago |

Putting it on Arweave is the best I can think of. And then link to the content on arweave.net:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:arweave.net+book

As Arweave is designed for this exact use case. Even if arweave.net disappears, one can still find the content one the Arweave blockchain via the hash. The chain is built in a way that it creates a very high incentive for people around the world to keep hosting the content.

bhickey 1 year ago | |

This is preposterous. You're suggesting a "solution" that's overly complicated by orders of magnitude, fragile and relies on the continued value of some shitcoin. Plus the company behind the underlying shitcoin is already dead because they were offering unlicensed securities.

dzhiurgis 1 year ago | | |

> is already dead

Which kinda proves the concept works. People shitting on web3 are clueless what it is.

kylebenzle 1 year ago | |

Whatever arweave is stupid but op has the right idea that the best place to store data on the Internet is the blockchain.

RiverCrochet 1 year ago |

You gotta go "store and forward" to have a chance.

- Make your static data small.

- Pick a version scheme and use it.

- Gather your static data into a release, including an indicator of the version, and sign it.

- Also gather your static data into a form easily transmittable by others. If your static data will fit into a few pages of PDFs, it can be read by just about anything with a CPU that real people touch, and can also be printable. There are many tools that create PDFs that aren't Adobe.

- HTML archives, such as those that SingleFile make, are better than PDFs but less accessible (e.g. not viewable on phones, require extension to be installed).

- License the content in a way that encourages sharing.

- Make sure the content itself encourages sharing. Good, unique artwork tends to do this, in addition to the data itself being interesting or important. Comics from the 1940s made it to the Internet age and they'll probably make the post-Internet age too.

- Discord, Telegram, and Github would be an example of three places that would understand the concept of "here's a PDF of a site, here for archival purposes, feel free to share this to anyone or print it."

purple-leafy 1 year ago |

Very simple. Turn the webpage into a static blob url, and the 2d barcode will launch that blob url.

Since it’s a static blob, you don’t need to host it at all. The url itself is the code for the webpage

p1esk 1 year ago | |

This won’t work – he wants to publish new information not already in the book.

lambdaba 1 year ago |

Anywhere + get the Internet Archive to index it?

IPFS could be a contender, though I don't know where it stands now, but it's the ambition, at least.

tmountain 1 year ago | |

The internet archive seems to continually be getting into legally precarious situations. I wouldn’t bet on it staying around for too long.

lambdaba 1 year ago | | |

there is no way we will let the Internet Archive die, absolutely no way

bityard 1 year ago | |

IPFS doesn't work like that. It's not an immutable archive. A node on the network has to actively host (or "pin") the content for it to be available on the network. Yes the content can be cached by other nodes, but see the definition of a cache for why you can't rely on that in the long term.

lambdaba 1 year ago | | |

Yes, I know, but I do think the theory is eventually, it would be cheapest and capable for permanent storage, well, storage is cheap already, the matter is more that the host is reliable enough, so it has to be decentralized.

sirodoht 1 year ago |

Posthaven is an option.

https://posthaven.com/pledge

sixtyj 1 year ago | |

This

simonebrunozzi 1 year ago |

I'll offer a weird but (I hope) valid alternative to the other great suggestions here:

print the code of the static webpage on a piece of paper. Even better, archival paper [0], so it will really last a long time.

In the future, anyone would be able to point a... smartphone, or a camera, to the paper, and instantly retrieve the webpage. An AI will ask them if they want to render the page using one of these very, very old things called browsers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid-free_paper

echoangle 1 year ago | |

OP said:

> In the back of the book, I'd like to put a 2D barcode to send folks to a static webpage somewhere, maybe for further information, an update, text changes, etc.

How are you going to put the update/text change into the printed book? I think the point was tobe able to change the info when the books are already distributed.

kylebenzle 1 year ago | |

I think OP said he wants it on the Internet.

rootshelled 1 year ago |

This is actually pretty hard to do. We all have heard of internet rot/dead internet theory.

One shout might be to link to internet archive instead of the resource directly. Though we can't be sure internet archive will keep the current system working as is (e.g. search params may change etc)

The only solid solution I have is to set up a foundation and pour money in so that they will be responsible for upkeep. But that would be an hassle to execute.

100 years in internet time is very long, internet as we know it now hasn't been along for 100 years.

I wonder if there aren't services that specialize in this.

xyzzy123 1 year ago | |

Have thought about this a bit. I think there's a "business model" where a non-profit foundation charges a very high price (say $50 or $100/gig) and the interest on that pays for the hosting and admin. One issue is startup risk, if you don't get enough people wanting to store data "forever" it won't be sustainable.

The foundation has a remit to also do some related "good works". The idea is that the pot of money (and the interest it throws off) acts as an incentive to keep the foundation going. Eventually the cost of hosting "legacy" data should drop close to zero. You could run it as an overlay on two clouds initially to avoid capital outlay.

I think you would want librarians / archivists on the board. It wouldn't require much in the way of software, making something that could last in the long term is more of a governance problem than a technical one.

loftsy 1 year ago |

1. Put it online now so ChatGPT indexes it. Can be forever prompted.

2. Put it in a Ethereum transaction.

More seriously, I have no idea.

simne 1 year ago |

I read there suggestion to carve in stone, and on second view it don't look bad idea.

But I suggest not just one stone, but build many hills on large piece of land and place them to form giant QR code, for example 1px=1m (resolution is not random, but it is typical for modern Earth imaging satellites, and for other Earth imaging technologies).

I think, in 100 years, most probably, will exist technology to make photo (or drawing) from height and then translate it into bits and decode text.

And to find it, I think will be enough to place in book geocoordinates and even most probably, Earth will be still round and even if GPS will not exist, somebody will know, how to convert GPS coordinates to what will exist.

With some luck, possible that these giant pictures will notice few big information entities and place in their archives, so history will save them.

Sure, here quality have not less importance than quantity, even so powerful entity as Life could disappear, so need to somehow attract attention of few, not only one.

mazzystar 1 year ago |

You may try "https://www.tinymind.me". (Declaration: This is something I made, but it is a non-profit product).

It allows you to write public blogs/ideas and is hosted on Github. Users can view it without logging in. In theory, if Github doesn't close down, your content will exist permanently.

saintamh 1 year ago |

I’m not sure I would bet on the web itself still existing in 100 years. That being said, I think the biggest risk here is your hosting company going out of business, or changing their products such that they won’t host your site anymore.

If you’re OK with your website having a big ugly URL (which might not be a problem if you use a QR code to point to it anyway) then hosting a static website on AWS S3 might be your best bet. There’s so much money flowing into AWS right now, I imagine there will be enough interest to keep it going for several decades to come.

EDITED TO ADD As far as i know you can prepay your AWS bills, so you could prepay a massive amount and hope it outruns future price inflation

JawsOfALion 1 year ago | |

If he's hosting just some textfiles (i.e. a few KB), he won't have any aws bills that he would need to worry about prepaying. (I have a static s3 website, low traffic and low storage size, and i have not paid anything on it for years).

At least that's the case today, but the policy may change tomorrow. It's not easy to guarantee anything 10 years from now, let alone 100 years.

mg 1 year ago |

I doubt that people will know what to do with the "2D barcode" in 100 years. Someone who is willing to investigate will figure it out. But it is not something that will be convenient.

I for example wouldn't know what to do with a barcode even today.

kylebenzle 1 year ago | |

You can use your phone+ an app to scan it, just because you can't figure that out doesn't mean people in 100 years are going to be morons.

philistine 1 year ago | | |

Are you 100% convinced that QR codes will be common enough in a 100 years for common people to figure it out?

I’m not.

nurettin 1 year ago | |

They would probably read the input using a solarpunk low power LLM chip.

zb3 1 year ago |

Don't just use one solution, use all of those mentioned here, redundancy might help.

astral_drama 1 year ago |

The most sensible thing to do here is found a religion and have your adherents ascribe a sacred quality to your writings and they'll then preserve it over millennia regardless of the format changes / translations required.

anotherhue 1 year ago |

I wonder how much data you could store if you turned the last ten pages into very dense QR codes that together formed a compressed tar?

The ink degradation might be a concern. And it would require some expertise to reassemble.

yellowsir 1 year ago | |

QRcodes are unrestricted in size. it's just a quetion of resolution and redundancy...

tomcam 1 year ago |

Websites are roughly similar to real estate. They have an irreducible amount of paid maintenance required. Domain names are subject to renewal fees, like property tax. Hosting isn’t free, and it’s subject to a bewildering, ever-evolving variety of attacks. Hosting itself costs money. The only hope is to pay for a trust to handle all of this.

Or just assume that if your writing is as valuable as you think it is, others will recognize its worth and keep it alive.

readyplayernull 1 year ago |

Spam your articles into any website that allows commenting, like forums, blogs, news sites, porn sites, etc. Start the text with a unique string that when searched throws no results currently, followed by date and time. Store the unique string in your barcode. When people search for that string in 100y they'll find any of the surviving texts, the date and time will let them know which is the order.

jayanthbagare 1 year ago |

Think knowledge as carried by the human brain. What you are asking is few generations ahead to remember the knowledge your brain created. The best way is to transmit it from brain to brain. Codify your knowledge into some kind of poetry stanzas. this would ensure effective compression and repeatability. Teach the poems to a few in the next generation. Create a loop to ensure that knowledge is passed verbatim. After a few centuries you will see it will survive. This how it is done traditionally

animesh 1 year ago | |

Reading all the amazing answers here, but this one stood out to me as an observer. Thank you for your sharing your thoughts on it.

JawsOfALion 1 year ago |

I'm pretty sure if you put a file on s3, make it public, it will be accessible for quite a while, with no cost (if it's just text like you're describing). I have an aws account that has the html/js stored in s3 for a static website i created, I haven't paid a bill in years on it, and the site is still running today.

I don't expect it to last 100 years though, they may very well change their free policies a year from now, hell, i don't know if AWS or even Amazon will be around 100 years from now.

firecall 1 year ago |

My strategy would be to go for redundancy:

The physical book can contain a QR Code, Barcode, printed URL and so on, that’s correct at the time of print.

But then leave hints on how to search and find the book online if those resources are not available.

Such as a promise to list the book with your Author name, book title, ISBN and so on.

Then replicate the content across the internet, and try to cross link to all the resources.

The only thing you can really trust is your own domain name, so that has to be the base right now.

rishikeshs 1 year ago |

I had a similar thought and wrote about evergreen blogs recently: https://rishikeshs.com/journal/evergreen-blogs/

Derek Sivers is planning something similar with Digital Legacy Trust: https://legacytrust.nz/

mytailorisrich 1 year ago |

> and be assured (mostly) that it'll be around 100 years or more from now?

You print it and add it to your book (not sure if any ink will do, though)

DamonHD 1 year ago |

I don't know, but I've put this question in my favourites list!

I do mantain a stripped-down ZIP of one of my key sites in Zenodo:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10119195

But maybe you could just host a plain-text or similar file there or at Dryad and hand out the DOI / URL?

aFaid7see0ni 1 year ago |

Linux kernel mailing list

sourcecodeplz 1 year ago |

Put it on Blogger from Google. Has been around since 1999. There are some huge blogs/websites hosted on Blogger.

They make money with Adsense, and it turn Google does to.

Google has killed a lot of products but in my opinion they will keep this. There are just so many blogs, little and small, some who have posts dating from '99 even, still online.

pavlov 1 year ago | |

Is Google going to be around in its current form a hundred years from now?

Google in 2024 feels like IBM in 1974. The brand will surely exist fifty years from now, but possibly much diminished. I wouldn’t count on any specific product surviving the “legacification” of Google.

smugma 1 year ago | |

I (wrongly?!) assumed that Google had shut down Blogger years ago and that this was sarcasm, using Google’s history of killing services to highlight the folly of relying on a commercial service to still be around years or decades later.

Poe’s law at its best.

orf 1 year ago |

GitHub and/or GitHub pages is the only sensible answer here.

tmountain 1 year ago |

Forever is a really long time, but I think a public GitHub repository should be reasonably durable. You can easily host sites on GitHub and Microsoft has a vested interest in keeping repositories around.

DrEbolaMD 1 year ago |

We have good records of books and music sheets from hundreds of years ago. Think Shakespeare and Mozart. Talk to your librarian. If your pages are worth keeping, I think that's your best bet.

cipz 1 year ago |

GitHub pages is the best place to go to. Also easy to update and on a platform that is here to stay

evronm 1 year ago |

Try Arweave: https://www.arweave.org/

theyknowitsxmas 1 year ago |

-Donate to a university and make them use the interest to achieve whatever you want.

-Take a screenshot and submit it to the patent office

max_ 1 year ago |

I would use Archive.is or Internet Archive

NicuCalcea 1 year ago |

Put it anywhere and archive it with the Wayback Machine.

yawpitch 1 year ago |

A perpetual trust is a legal instrument that is designed to ensure an asset is passed down generations and dispersed in a particular, pre-determined way. Hire a lawyer to help put some non-coastal real estate and some inert metals and some extremely safe index funds and bonds in that and have it rebalance and reinvest every so often and periodically draw off enough from the accumulating interest to pay for whatever a domain and static hosting costs, into the future, plus maybe a little to cover translating a text file into whatever the hell our AI overlords are serving after they’re done with all the genociding.

nivertech 1 year ago |

carve it as QR codes in stone

echoangle 1 year ago | |

And then people looking for the info can travel to the location of the stones and scan them? That doesn't sound very convenient.

politelemon 1 year ago |

Multiple git repositories.

stonethrowaway 1 year ago |

I’m surprised we don’t use archived/cached links for read-only content more often.