💾 Archived View for alexanderbass.com › archiving.gmi captured on 2023-09-08 at 15:46:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-06-14)
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📅 June 6th, 2023
It's common to see articles about websites shutting down, changing ownership, or otherwise deleting old content. When this happens you'll most definitely see an effort to scrape and download all of the site's content to be preserved. Most recently DPreview, a photography site was shut down with archivists jumping in to scrape everything[1].
This drag net method of archiving is both helpful and annoying for the same reason; *everything* is being downloaded. This is done in the hopes that the archive will be useful some day. Most of what is downloaded will be junk. One off inside jokes on long forgotten forums will be mixed in with the rare insightful comment. When a website is about to shut down, there is not time to sort through each and every thread, or image, or article to see whether it's valuable, so everything must be downloaded. The annoyance comes when you try to find something in the archive. An archive of Twitter will have just as much garbage Twitter has, and will be slow to search through.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against the way archive team just downloads everything, but I think in some situations there is a better way for individuals to archive online media. Instead of panicking and downloading everything when a site is shutting down, it would be more efficient to, in the course of browsing the internet, download helpful and valuable media when you stumble upon it.
As a real example, I like watching recorded performances of 1970s musicians on YouTube. For one reason or another (likely copyright) these videos sometimes just disappear. Those videos were niche in the first place so Archive.org doesn't have them saved. If I want to go back and watch these videos, I can't; they're gone from the internet. And while they might still exist in someones private collection or an obscure torrent tracker, those old videos are practically gone.
So, in your browsing of the web, if you find something useful that you may want to see another day, download it. Storage is cheap and downloading is easy. In most cases archiving is easy: just download the image/html/pdf or copy paste text, but some sites make it harder. Youtube doesn't let you download videos directly but tools such as YT-DLP[2] can easily take care of this. Too many times I've looked back to watch again or read again something on the internet only to feel the sinking feeling of "it's gone." Archive what you find useful.