There's so much old and valuable content on the web that's now only accessible via the Internet Archive. But that can be slow and has gaps. I wonder if Gemini would be a good home for historical Internet content.
1 month ago 路 馃憤 johano
There are individual projects that back up/mirror some text-based web stuff on gemini and gopher. Some that come to mind are ben collivers gamefaqs mirror (now on gopher, was on gemini at one point) and freeshells TDLR mirror. I even have mirrors for a few sites I like over on my capsule. 路 1 month ago
Yeah, @johano, Im not thinking of mirroring, that would be an insane endeavor. And every automatic HTML to gemtext converter I've tried leaves a lot to be desired. I'm thinking just some select legacy sites with timeless content. 路 1 month ago
I do think that Gemini could be a good home for a lot of historic web content. whether or not that entails some kind of automatic mirroring of the Internet Archive is another question though... 路 1 month ago
As an example, there's one particular page I frequently look at in the Internet Archive that's mostly text and images. There is no interactivity.
It takes ~5 seconds for the first response and 20-30 seconds until the page is fully loaded. If I pull up the dev console I see many JavaScript errors. If I move this page into a Gemini site it will load instantly. 路 1 month ago
It's not about solving the content-retention problem, it's about solving the archival problem. The Internet Archive cannot effectively archive a *lot* of web content, even very old content, because it depends on client-side JavaScript or external services. That makes attempting to archive a website very brittle.
With Gemini once you'd saved the files it's guaranteed to load the same. 路 1 month ago
Gemini has similar issues with content retention. Servers come and go, stuff doesn't really stick around unless someone works to make that happen 路 1 month ago