1 pointby SERSI-S2 hours ago1 comment
  • toomuchtodoan hour ago
    • SERSI-S37 minutes ago
      Fair point. Filecoin answers the question “will this file still be around in 10 years?” through economic incentives.

      What I’m poking at is the layer above that: “will anyone actually understand this file in 100 years?”

      Storage alone won’t cut it. You need shared context, evolving semantics, and some form of continuity in the community doing the interpreting. The Library of Alexandria kept scrolls for centuries — but once the interpretive context vanished, most of the knowledge went with it.

      • toomuchtodo32 minutes ago
        You need a centralized, cohesive entity with a distributed storage footprint for the time spans you’re interested in (100+ years) imho. The distributed nature creates geographic resiliency while the cohesion provides motivation for durability. “How do you get people to care and keep caring.” Bit of a cybernetics governance problem, as it relates to institutions that are public goods. You need both the infrastructure the archive sits on, and the people who care to curate and custodian the archive, and those people will change over lifetimes like the Ship of Theseus. Do they have the tools they need? Do you have the right people for the job? How will you find new people over time interested in continuing to solve this problem?

        Think in systems.

        https://longnow.org/talks/02011-kahle/

        https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-permanent-leg...

        > “The goal is for the endowment to provide, at the very minimum, permanent storage of users’ materials and the capability to download these materials at any time,” Friedman says. “But it’s not just the cost of storage — these fees also support an organization committed to protecting, migrating, and maintaining access to user content for all time.”