Archive.is blog

About Wikipedia, I promised to write when the referendum there ended so as not to influence it:

1. Kiwi Farms set up an on-premise mirror of all archive.xx links from their forum (the volume is comparable). Wikimedia… never even had such an idea. That’s all you need to know about linkrot, contingency plans, and who to blame when links disappear.
2. The value of the archive for Wikipedia was not in linkrot, but in the ability to offload copyright issues. This is not about paywalls. This is, for example, about copyright trolls writing claims to stock photos, about articles deleted or changed for political reasons but pursued under the guise of copyright, etc. It is precisely these links that become dead, then got replaced with archive.xx, and we become the sink for all the attacks, legal and illegal. The need for fast-flux hosting, pseudonyms, and other pirate attributes stems largely from this. Do we really need this kind of “social burden”? Build your own toilet thing, you have millions.