I’ve been supporting Wikipedia with a monthly $5 donation. By now, ~$150 in total! I want to support all kinds of great projects, but I don’t have an infinite amount of money to share between everything that exists 😔
I might switch to a monthly donation to The Internet Archive just because of how crucial its existence is.
I think The Internet Archive needs it more.
summary of issues with Wikipedia written by a Lemmy developer https://ibis.wiki/article/Announcing_Ibis,_the_federated_Wikipedia_Alternative@ibis.wiki
If only they hadn’t shot themselves so hard in the foot during covid with their book lending, and dug the hole so much deeper with their piss poor handling of the lawsuit.
While I do very much support what they do, I’d be reluctant to give them money, if only because it might go to paying their dumbass lawyer.
That lawsuit was a long time in coming. Covid just goosed the schedule forward about a year, and probably made it easier.
The lawsuit wasn’t coming because they were in a strong grey area with one physical copy per digital. By offering unlimited copies they directly invited a lawsuit.
And then their legal defense had absolutely no competency behind it. They didn’t come with any legal principles, they basically just said “we shouldn’t be punished because we’re nice”, and then they tried the same style of argument during appeal, basically throwing money away on legal expenses. All the while they were campaigning for donations - the people that supported them were paying the lawyers, not for the IA’s regular activities.
I actually agree that was handled very poorly. Knowingly crossing a line they had been repeatedly been warned for, was just begging for a lawsuit they were sure to lose. I have supported them in the past, but this has also held me back from supporting them since this happened.
I mean I can forgive crossing the line, it was covid, which were special circumstances. It’s frustrating though because they basically ruined a good thing, lending one digital per physical copy they owned was a nice grey area, but now there is a ruling stating that is explicitly illegal.
What I cannot forgive is their flimsy legal argument that had no legal principles behind it, and particularly the fact that they tried the same bullshit on appeal, instead of just cutting their losses. All the while they were campaigning for donations to pay for it.
Same here. I’m waiting to see that lawsuit reach its final conclusion, I don’t want to throw good money after bad.
Even afterward, I’m concerned that they might go do some stupid stunt like that again. I’ll want to see if there’s any fallout among their leadership over getting into this situation.
Or, it’s because whoever is doing this hates freedom of information and historical evidence. There’s a long list of powerful people and governments who have the resources and will to carry out these attacks.
Cyber warfare is real, and the Internet archive is a museum and library of culture and truth. It provides evidence and context to our past.
As in conventional war, it is valuable to the amoral to destroy culture and truth in order to control it. Many would like to kill that to supplant it with their version of events that can’t be refuted with evidence.
Betting this is someone desiring to monetize some or all of what they are offering. Could be any malicious government too
There’s an entire industry that harvests content from archive.org for modern ad spam
how about ddosn’t? Please?
They should release an app where people can donate a portion of their storage to be used for redundancy in case anything happens to the archive.
While I fully support the spirit of this idea, the problem here has little to do with a lack of storage redundancy and everything to do with the bandwidth limitations of a nonprofit company vs a malicious nation state that would seek to deny access to this sort of resource. Basically, given enough bandwidth, you either become resilient to most of these attacks or you become capable of performing them yourself on anyone with a slower connection than you.
I think the Internet Archive would be better served by direct donations, although I’d also love to see a complete torrent posted that gets updated regularly for anyone with the storage and bandwidth necessary to grab and then re-seed it. The web content alone is nearly a trillion pages, though, so that’s not going to be a long list of volunteers.
As you said, the solution is simple: Decentralized instances.
Anyone could spin a “WebArchive” instance and have the data synced from the other independent nodes… Similar to how crypto ledgers sync transactions…
But wait… this means anyone could see past removed important historical data from websites which may not benefit [ YOU KNOW WHO ]