Technology

To be realistic we need to pick and choose what to keep and expend effort/resources on those chosen things.

Without a technological breakthrough in data storage at some point there's got to be some kind of triage done. We all generate more information now than ever before, and this trend just keeps increasing. With things like A.I, XR, the metaverse or other similar concepts it'll also get exponentially more insane how much data we generate. It's not realistic at the moment, technologically or financially, to keep all of it in multiple geographically distributed copies, in a format that will last forever. For a lot of people or organizations it's not even feasible to keep one copy in some cases due to costs.

To do otherwise we would need a breakthrough that enables insanely cheap, infinitely scalable storage, that is immune to corruption (physical or digital) and optionally immutable to prevent modification. It would have to function in such a way that any reasonably advanced civilization can use the basic laws of physics to figure out how it works and consume the contents without any context of what the devices are. It would also have to work regardless of how fragmented it is, to use terms of today's technology if they only find one hard drive out of what used to be a pool of 100, it still needs to work on some level.

It's an interesting thought experiment and hopefully there's some ridiculously smart people working on it.

Ultimately this is a problem that’s never going away until we replace URLs. The HTTP approach to find documents by URL, i.e. server/path, is fundamentally brittle. Doesn’t matter how careful you are, doesn’t matter how much best practice you follow, that URL is going to be dead in a few years. The problem is made worse by DNS, which in turn makes URLs expensive and expire.

There are approaches like IPFS, which uses content-based addressing (i.e. fancy file hashes), but that’s note enough either, as it provide no good way to update a resource.

The best™ solution would be some kind of global blockchain thing that keeps record of what people publish, giving each document a unique id, hash, and some way to update that resource in a non-destructive way (i.e. the version history is preserved). Hosting itself would still need to be done by other parties, but a global log file that lists out all the stuff humans have published would make it much easier and reliable to mirror it.

The end result should be “Internet as globally distributed immutable data structure”.

Bit frustrating that this whole problem isn’t getting the attention it deserves. And that even relatively new projects like the Fediverse aren't putting in the extra effort to at least address it locally.

It sucks that we already have internet lost media

Other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets

I mean I could just smash or burn those things, and lots of important physical artifacts were smashed and burned over the years. I don't think that easy destructability is unique to data. As far as archaeology is concerned (and I'm no expert on the matter!), the fact that the artefacts are fragile is not an unprecedented challenge. What's scary IMO is the public perception that data, especially data on the cloud, is somehow immune from eventual destruction. This is the impulse that guides people (myself included) to be sloppy with archiving our data, specifically by placing trust in the corporations that administer cloud services to keep our data as if our of the kindness of their hearts.