longevity
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Longevity is the goal of keeping your data as future-friendly and future-proof as possible; it is one of the indieweb principles.
If human society is able to preserve ancient papyrus, Victorian photographs and dinosaur bones, we should be able to build web technology that doesn't require us to destroy everything we've done every few years in the name of progress.
Contents |
Articles and talks
- 2016-07-02
Kevin Marks: The point of html is to be a resilient long term document format.
- 2016-06-22 : Digital Life After Death (archived)
- 2014-10-10 Discussion at CyborgCamp, Networked Mortality (video)
- 2011 Build conference:
Jeremy Keith's talk: All Our Yesterdays (video)
- 2008-10-26 Jeremy Keith: The Long Web in the inaugural Head conference opening talk
- 2006-06-17
Tantek Çelik: Open data formats, longevity, and microformats
- 2003-03-06 Bert Bos: An essay on W3C's design principles - Longevity
Examples
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Ben Roberts has cited that he has AIM chat logs dating back to 2002, maintained after filesystem and OS changes primarily because they were in html format, while losing much of his older e-mail when he could not get them out of a software that was no longer functional. [1]
- ...
Brainstorming
Dead Man's Switch
- Conversation from #indiewebcamp IRC channel
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Shane Becker: I'm thinking about a "dead man's switch" after reading Willo Bloo's post "Death and Politcs". The longevity of our personal sites isn’t really a solved problem. And the attempted solutions are definitely not very indie. What I’m thinking about exploring now is a kind of “dead man’s switch” to hand over the keys to some trusted person if I don’t perform some action (click a link, respond to a notification email, etc) in some amount of time. Maybe even spin up a subdomain (or make public an existing subdomain) like memorial.<site>.com or something similar. to make it even easier for whoever to do whatever, but keeps it on our site (sort of).
- Kevin Marks: Google has a thing for that
- https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/account/inactive
- Shane Becker: I don’t trust google to not sunset that feature/product over the course of my life and death.
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Aaron Parecki: I keep thinking about a dead man's switch too, but for things other than my website also. Makes me nervous not having a good system for that every time I travel. The best archive of your site is a folder of static assets, which is another thing to consider.
-
gRegor Morrill: I'm interested in this but have no idea where to start currently. Researching http://networkedmortality.com via the video of the same name (linked above).
IndieWeb trust
- conversation from #indieweb-dev IRC channel
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Peter Molnar the most problematic part of indieweb for longetivity is who's going to pay for your domain if you're not?
- ...
-
Martijn van der Ven I am not sure every country will allow you to require your heirs to do something in your name. You are better off setting up a trust to do that, who are legally bound by the rules of the trust. A single IndieWeb trust might even work: leave them money and transfer your hosting/domain to the IndieWeb Trust and they keep paying the bills.
Silo Examples
- Facebook: Legacy Contact
- Google: Inactive Account Manager
- Twitter: manual, via support
Vulnerabilities
There are many vulnerabilities to longevity. It makes sense to document them as trends occur.
JS for content
As summarized on 2016-07-02 by Kevin Marks: The point of html is to be a resilient long term document format. Replacing it with nested javascript dependencies is a bad idea. #indieweb
More: js;dr.
See Also
- principles
- archival
- https://twitter.com/hashtag/longweb
- Digital inheritance page at Wikipedia
- 2017-06-09 Brewster Kahle Collector or Digital Librarian?
- 2017-09-14
Manton Reece Tomorrow matters
- 2017-10-30 André Staltz: The Web began dying in 2014, here's how
