While I am harping on the subject of internet social media based on self-publishing rather than large republishing companies like Fbook, Twitter, etc...
I am quite concerned about the raw records that form the history of our times simply vanishing, irretrievably, as people age and die.
In earlier days things were recorded with relative permanence on paper (or stone). Not so today - one's entire life's work can vanish in few microseconds.
Not just the media or the storage of today are impermanent, but we have created a clock-driven scythe in the form of ICANN's utterly stupid domain name renewal system. There are as many potential domain names as electrons in the universe, but ICANN rules require leasing them in 1 to 10 year increments, thus undermining much of the means of referencing our already weakly permanent digital creations.
(I won't harp on how impermanent and fragile are our database driven, dynamically constructed, web pages.)
@karlauerbach sounds like a good time to bring up #IPFS where content is located by its hash rather than some location or DNS record.
Really, it sounds like you’re trying to use DNS for something it was never intended for, and complaining that it doesn’t do well something that it was never supposed to do in the first place.
@hyolo
Data is stored permanently so anything built on that will be permanent, but can be updated in a none destructive way using the append-only RegisterCRDT data type.
So if you map a name to the address of a register (eg by hashing the name), the register can store the content address pointed to by that name - and all previous addresses - so you get versioned perpetual data. The data pointed to by a register could be anything, not just a website.
@happyborg that honestly sounds like re-inventing a blockchain. How is data stored permanently, by who, and how is it ensured that they play nice? Also where can I learn more, since a search query for "autonomi" returns what seems like mostly unrelated stuff. @hyolo@volkris@karlauerbach
@Amikke
The implementation is very different to Blockchain and scalable, energy efficient and fast.
The network is comprised of a large number of simple nodes which can run on very lightweight hardware such as Raspberry Pi. Nodes store up to 2GB each in encrypted chunks. Nodes which aren't performing properly will be shunned by others.
Permanent content is a hope more than a reality - too many formats keep changing. That's why I have my own stuff in HUGO which uses flat file input to generate a tree of very portable files that can be run - just via a directory copy (tar, rsync, etc) as a Document Root under Apache or Ngnix or pretty much any other web server.
Accessibility is also troubled - IP addresses change whether IPv4 or IPv6. That's why DNS permanence is important. But even TLS is troubled - the IETF has deprecated digest algorithms and that has left some web services (particularly on IoT devices) unusable by many browsers. (I preserve some old systems as VMs just to solve this issue.)
@karlauerbach
We're on the same page and I'm working to make this a reality. Autonomi is a project I've been helping out with for a decade because of that, and I'm working on a demo in this area at the moment. So watch this space! @volkris
Add comment