That's one option. Geocities in particular was a bit over 1TB, so it wouldn't have been too expensive to host it read-only. Or they could send the data to an archive like IA.
Absolutely! I think being able to host it locally on our own server resources and domain would be nice for not having the uptime in the hands of a third-party. Not that I don't trust that it'll be there, but as a way of guaranteeing availability and long-term permanence of data, is quite important.
Offline browser caching would be nice, even if that needs to happen via a browser extension, which might make sharing even easier, especially if you could pick a pad to add it to.
is the size of the common Web already way too large to play catch up against google/bing at this point?
my dream, is a distributed/p2p index. each browser contribute to storing part of the overall index, and handle queries coming from other users so that how to fund huge data centers never become a question.
We already had the solution: a decentralized web. But do note that the author used 'medium' rather than to use his own platform and so effectively adds to the value of the medium content-silo.
I would gladly see a client that lets users allocate between 50 to 200MB of storage to host other websites. It could run on phones and would allow redundancy.
Can't Wikipedia decentralise its hosting? Plenty of people would be happy to donate a portion of their bandwidth and storage (I'm thinking of something BitTorrent like). It would fit Wikipedia's purpose and lower costs significantly.
You are right, a p2p web wont solve the barrier to entry, but web hosting costs $20 a year, so its not much of a barrier.
The real cost is scale, $20 year will cover a few thousand users but if you want googles scale it will cost you in bandwidth and complexity. p2p like torrents radically reduces the cost of bandwidth by distributing it, but more importantly it reduces complexity by standardising it.
Once the complexity is standardised budget web hosting can provide google scale for dirt cheap, and there are millions of budget hosting companies too many to shutdown them all giving you censorship resistance.
The process of getting content on to the web has historically been pretty daunting, and is IMO much easier now than the bad old days when a .com domain cost $99/year and hosting files involved figuring out how to use an FTP client.
In comparison, services like Now from Zeit, Netlify, Surge, heck, even RunKit, make this stuff so much easier in comparison now. As long as the performance optimizations are something that can happen automatically with tools like these, and are reasonable to use yourself even if you want to configure your own server, I think that's a net win.
I do agree with you though that we ought to fight tooth and nail to keep the web as approachable a platform for new developers as it was when we were new to it.
On balance, I'm more comfortable with services abstracting this stuff, since new developers are likely to use those services anyway. That's particularly true if the alternative is giving Google even more centralized power, and worse, access to more information that proxying all of those AST files would allow them to snoop on.
I think that's called HTTP. Then all you need is a place to search the content, where hosting that is easier than hosting all the data. And that's called google.
The contents might already be on SciHub and other sites, but I can already see the bandwidth spike they're going to receive from doing this... from those sites wanting to complete their collection, among others.
This is something that libraries might be in a good position to offer. They're increasingly pushing people to use private third parties for anything digital (and putting the public at risk of being tracked and advertised to in the process) but I'd love to see them doing more hosting of online services themselves.
So, can we download everything that we can, and host it somewhere else?
No, really?
I see some of the content has a license that would appear to allow it. But do any of us have the time, energy, and resources to sit down and do it?
This certainly isn't the first or last time some website with interesting content is going to go down. Maybe we should all get better at forking open source content as a matter of course.
If we don't, then I think criticizing Google for not being willing to host it is pretty lame.
That's the thing, right? Most of us have plenty of bandwidth and storage space and everything we need to host a site sitting in our living room. It's still too complicated for most people, though. It should already be as easy as Facebook...
I think a decentralized web is easier than what people think. In the early days of the web, users could host their creations somewhere in their ISP's hard disks.
The same model could work now, with a small difference: instead of storing only data, it may also host applications that manage those data, and collaborate with same/other applications of same/other users.
For example, a photo app could allow us to manage our photos at a specific host of our choice; the same photo app uses a sharing protocol so as that the photos are shared with other users of our choice.
The stored data are encrypted by our own keys and therefore not visible to third parties, we still get to share our stuff with our mates, it's decentralized because no central authority can lay claim on our data, it's protected because it is encrypted for us, but the infrastructure required for this to run is provided by a centralized entity.
Hosting a 32kb library yourself shouldn't be that hard in the days of 50mbps+ LTE mobile internet.
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