While I am harping on the subject of internet social media based on self-publishing rather than large republishing companies like Fbook, Twitter, etc...
I am quite concerned about the raw records that form the history of our times simply vanishing, irretrievably, as people age and die.
In earlier days things were recorded with relative permanence on paper (or stone). Not so today - one's entire life's work can vanish in few microseconds.
Not just the media or the storage of today are impermanent, but we have created a clock-driven scythe in the form of ICANN's utterly stupid domain name renewal system. There are as many potential domain names as electrons in the universe, but ICANN rules require leasing them in 1 to 10 year increments, thus undermining much of the means of referencing our already weakly permanent digital creations.
(I won't harp on how impermanent and fragile are our database driven, dynamically constructed, web pages.)
@karlauerbach sounds like a good time to bring up #IPFS where content is located by its hash rather than some location or DNS record.
Really, it sounds like you're trying to use DNS for something it was never intended for, and complaining that it doesn't do well something that it was never supposed to do in the first place.
DNS was not supposed to be about permanence.
@volkris
That's a fair point but dodges the issue.
What if you could have both:
- permanent content assessable data.
- permanent DNS.
Autonomi is coming and offers both in a truly decentralized, autonomous network (and no Blockchain).
(BTW IPFS data isn't permanent, just like DNS it can disappear unless someone is keeping it alive.)
@happyborg you can't have permanent content accessible data. That is a pipe dream. All data accessibility relies on someone being around who is willing to expend resources to serve it, and that cannot be guaranteed.
So first step is to get away from talking about permanence, which is just not something that can be promised.
Second step is to separate different roles being provided by different tools here.
DNS does not serve the content--That's just not what that tool does, not the role it plays-- so you can't really talk about keeping data alive in the same context as DNS. DNS doesn't do that in the first place.
In the end, you're free to run your own DNS. Any of us can start our own name servers to provide whatever lookup we want, for as long as we want.
I think you are just really confusing a lot of different topics here.
@karlauerbach @volkris @happyborg thank god AI will have it all on hand.
@volkris @happyborg I have run my own DNS servers, even had my own TLD. (https://cavebear.com/eweregistry/ )
The core part of most URLs is the domain name part. Invalidate that and the URL becomes useless and the thing it points to becomes an orphan.
ICANN's year-by-year rent pretty much guarantees that links will eventually die as people die, thus orphaning content.
Preservation after death isn't easy - one needs storage & form that are likely to persist. Dynamic content - Wordpress, etc are built piles of javascript, Python, Perl, and database SQL. Those, as any programmer knows, require maintenance (witness Python 2 replacement by somewhat incompatible Python 3.)
We have already largely lost a huge amount of content in Flash. Yes, techies can figure out how to get vanilla Flash to play, but for most people it's a non-starter.
Many of us can no longer read Zip drives, floppies, etc (I even have some old paper tapes.)
And TLS algorithms are now-and-then depreciated, putting content onto unreachable islands.