I keep thinking about self-hosting and people dying, myself included. So my first wish for the end of the year is a solar-powered machine that takes all my websites and turns them into clay tablets to bury and survive the coming darkness.

Other than that, however, I think the solution would have to involve a kind decentralized archive sharing where I offer an archive (zip, tarball) for download and whoever has it can share it peer-to-peer with others. Is this how torrents work? I think I don't understand what words like "tracker" mean. Also, where does the original torrent come from and where does it go? I know there are sites where I can search for and download torrent files. But what happens if Alice has a file she wants to share with others including Bob, does she create a torrent and offers it on her website, Bob finds it, downloads it, runs a torrent client and gets a copy. If Alice and her website disappear, how does Charlie get a copy now? Bob isn't hosting Alice's torrent file on his website. So are they all dependent on a torrent hosting site?

I'm only half-aware of IPFS and when I read the Wikipedia page, there's stuff about hashes and content addressing, but how does that work from a user perspective? Is there a directory? How does Charlie learn about Alice's site that's no longer online and how does Charlie get a copy from Bob? Can Bob make a list of files on offer and Charlie can get them all, maybe from Bob and maybe from others?

In this case, preservation would mean: you need people interested in keeping a copy; the copies need to survive; the copies must be listed; the lists must be distributed widely; at least some people must make copies of these lists.

So, for me and you and some other fedi randos, we could have a "fedi website archive" list where our names are listed together with the hashes pointing to the content, and some ipfs client would keep it in sync.

The next question, though: how do keep this list updated? What little I know about these chains is that they are immutable so is there a way to say: "this is the updated list"? That would require some sort of social control and trust, too. An association of the living members of the "fedi website archive" list that manages the yearly updates, perhaps?

And so how would the maintenance actually work, I wonder. I write a web app. We chat. (I think the human element is important.) You have an account based on an email address and upload an archive and give it a name (the name of your website, a short description, its current URL). Once a year, the living associates meet and discuss whether to dump some of their members who have turned fascist or whatnot (sadly, always a possibility). Then we use the data gathered by the website to generate a new "directory" list with names, description, URL and hash (the URL may no longer work) and all the members share or host (??) this new directory and drop previous directories so that the old versions of our sites can be forgotten. And the ipfs clients do the magic of actually exchanging the archive bytes?

Would that work? Would you want to be part of this association? We could create an association according to Swiss law. There are some famous international orgs that use this format.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_association