Had this thought the other day and tbh it’s horrifying to think about the implications of one, or God forbid all, of them going down.
Stackoverflow too but that only applies to nerds haha
I would add Project Gutenberg and Open Street Map to your list.
I think it’s a bit ironic that Wikipedia hasn’t succumbed to the modern era of misinformation the way other information sources have, particularly given the warnings about it that have been given in the past. Not saying those warnings aren’t warranted, just that the way things have played out is counter to said expectations.
There is people who watch most popular articles,its not rlly misinformation.
Let’s help PeerTube replace YouTube.
One of those is not a non-profit foundation, and that’s a Problem.
And that one is not really comparable to the library of Alexandria.
But it would probably be the most interesting to future archeologists. At least all the noncommercial videos people make about their lives. The “you” part of YouTube.
You mean ContentCreatorTube. The internet was a fucking mistake.
The you part of youtube was definitely people making videos for the fun of it. Things like videos about a topic they’re passionate about (eg. Fallout NV, weird mechanics in games, etc.), 2008-esque skits, lets plays, and all that. It still exists, but youtube was really at its peak when it was just a buncha random people living their lives and having fun.
Wikipedia essentially can’t be destroyed without a global catastrophe that would mean we have way worse problems. Wikipedia is downloadable. Meaning the ENTIRE Wikipedia. And so there are many copies of it stored all around the planet.
If you have an extra 150 GB of space available then you can download a personal copy for yourself
https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-for-offline-at-your-fingertips-reading/
With scraping, you can fully download YouTube, too.
You just need an additional 10 EB of storage space, Millions of different IP addresses, a law firm to deffend against Alphabet, lots of time and energy, …
I think i have an old thumb drive with 10 exabytes free on it
Having just signed up for storage from Hertzer for nextcloud, that’s insane. It’d be cheap as hell to just… Have my own Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
It’s under 25 GB, too.
Is that compressed? I assume, they let you download zip files?
But that’s just for the text version without media files
25gb of text is a lot dang!
I assume that contains all the different languages. So most articles will repeat the same information like 10 times or whatever for all the different common languages. Still a huge amount of text though!
Nope, 25 gb is just english language wikipedia compressed, no images. All the other languages are smaller.
Ahh compressed so it’s like… a lot times a lot of text
There was a video I saw (I think it was hank or John Green), where they talked about the implications of twitter being deleted during the start of Elon. They pulled out a joke book they bought of “1000 twitter posts” and said how it would be the only recorded proof they (personally) had of what twitter was.
It’s terrifying thinking of just how much information is just being put in the hands of companies that don’t care or just on old hard drives about to give out due to funding. I wish there was a way to backup a random part of the information automatically, like a “I’ll give you a terabyte of backup, make the most of it” automatically choosing what isn’t backuped already.
Also add reddit too, the amount of times I’ve searched a question and went through 2024 website crap then went back to the search and added “site:reddit” into DuckDuckGo and got an answer instantly.
Add wiki books https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
Libretexts https://commons.libretexts.org/
And Openstax https://openstax.org/subjects
wikibooks is cool, had no idea that existed. I’m sure next time I get curious at 3am I’ll end up there reading about the history of ‘vectors’ or some other random stuff lol
Alexandria was important in its time, but in terms of the volume and quality of information we keep on Wikipedia alone, it is a mosquito in the Taj Mahal.
There pught to be a decentralized archive of YT. …and Archive
The problem with YouTube is the sheer amount of storage required. Just going by the 10 Exabyte figure mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are about 25,000 fediverse servers across all services in total IIRC, so even if you evenly split that 10EB across all of them, they would still need 400TB each just to cover what we have today.
Famously YouTube needs a petabyte of fresh storage every day, so each of those servers would need to be able to accept an additional 40GB a day.
Realistically though, any kind of decentralised archive wouldn’t start with 25,000 servers, so the operational needs are going to be significantly higher in reality
