I hope archive.org posts another copy on-line so that if I want to refer to this later, after lemmy and the whole cargo-cult-deadend activitypub architecture has gone the way of the dodo, I will still be able to.

To go further with this, I’m glad that I live in one of the most archive-happy time periods in history, at least when it comes to public data. Much of human history is simply lost to us. The wealthy might have distorted histories of themselves written and some records persist, but historical records are often incomplete or straight up propaganda. Only recently have we gotten to the point where just about anyone has the capability to keep a written record of their life (universal literacy).

But actually storing those for millennia is hard. Most medium degrade quite quickly, maybe even within decades. Certain texts were only preserved via regularly copying, hardly scalable. It takes something like the Internet Archive to preserve a lasting legacy that can extend past the most influential people into the experiences of commoners.