Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
You make a good point about the exclusion of sites that probably deserve to be in the Wayback Machine. Would you support a complementary archive that took snaps of the excluded websites?

Does anyone know of one or want to set one up?

(To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything, but Byuu's tragic story is enough for me to think that the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardless of its ethical orientation.)

> (To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything, but Byuu's tragic story is enough for me to think that the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardless of its ethical orientation.)

Even if it didn't, preserving places like KF is necessary to prevent future scholars from having a really warped idea of what the Internet was like in the 2020s. I find KF extremely off putting (I lurked there long enough to form my own opinion), but I'm not sure how a person is supposed to research how to prevent unhealthy communities from forming without examples of said communities.

I also find it darkly hilarious/sus in light of the fact that one of the primary points of the social justice movement is how we've whitewashed/erased our history. (e.g. how Americans' history education has minimized the perspective of Native Americans or omitted uncomfortable facts about racial discrimination). Are they against historical revisionism or do they just think they'd pick better things to 'erase'? I feel the same way about censoring books that use the n-word: knowing that was at one point acceptable really hammers home how acceptable open racism was for most of American history. Censoring/omitting places like KF from archives (when those archives claim to be representative/neutral) is going to give the impression that there was far more consensus on the 2010s/2020s Internet than there actually was. It's misleading.

Archive.is has a donation page set up on buymeacoffee [1]. I prefer to use them over web.archive.org.

>Would you support a complementary archive that took snaps of the excluded websites?

Now that I have looked at it, I likely will. I never was one to donate my money to anybody (especially with no income...), but now being employed I believe it's only fair to give them a little bit here and there for them to keep afloat.

>To be clear, it's not that I'm a big fan of Kiwifarms or anything

Neither am I. I just believe that an archive shouldn't be biased - and should keep all stuff up as long as it isn't strictly illegal, eg. CSAM or piracy. This is a blurry line though - I myself would like to be able to check out a hypothetical neo-Nazi group's website after they are all arrested for doing X to check what its contents looked like - but I am definitely in a minority here. So, essentially... >the site has significant cultural and historical value, regardless of its ethical orientation. Significant can be discussed, but I see it as a very subjective measure.

[1] https://buymeacoffee.com/archive.today

I absolutely will not support archive.is/archive.today given the shenanigans they’ve pulled with cloudflare dns [1].

> Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.

> The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users.

[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-is-failing-...

That does sort of sound like Cloudflare is pulling the shenanigans. It's awfully convenient for a CDN company (the same company that MITMs half the web) to cite privacy concerns to not pass through data to enable better request routing. In almost all cases the DNS lookup precedes a connection from the client anyway.
EDNS subnet/ECS is an optional DNS extension. DNS requests have no obligation to provide it. archive.is's behavior is in violation of RFC 7871 [1]:

> Note again that a query MUST NOT be refused solely because it provides 0 address bits.

The shenanigans are absolutely on archive.is's side here.

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7871#section-7.5

When the RFC refers to a query being refused, it's talking about a response with rcode=REFUSED. Archive.is is responding with rcode=NOERROR and bogus RR data. Shenanigans? Yes. RFC violation? No.
Perhaps technically not a violation but clearly against the spirit of the RFC.
Unfortunately archive.is hides behind buttflare captchas and refuses to work at all in my Firefox install. That is not the kind of Internet I want to support.