Keep Our Servers Running

sonicrocketman

Just posting this so others can be reminded to donate the archive (no association by me, just a fan).

totalconfusion

Who's paying?

pm90

It was super easy to donate; Im so glad they have a landing page that supports several payment methods and makes it easy to donate. I love the wayback machine, hope everyone pitches in : ).

Cider9986

THere's also archive.today who does great user-directed archiving. We don't appreciate this infrastructure some random guy runs enough. It's annoying how often archive.org blocks sites but they both complement each other very well. https://liberapay.com/archiveis/donate https://coindrop.to/archive When finding archive.today's Monero donation address just now, I had to use archive.org because donatemonero.org [1] is down. https://web.archive.org/web/20260526080016/https://donatemon...

qingcharles

Just donated. Appreciate the reminder.

arjie

I do like the Internet Archive but I wish I could retrieve large segments from it myself. It has very aggressive 429s. It would be a nice higher donor tier feature. Maybe it’s not possible to do so and retain 501c3 status? Regardless I have had to start performing personal datahoarding. C’est la vie.

crewman9

Yeah, _no_ Shut ClimateGPT down, apologize and then we can talk about donation.

akudha

How do they handle AI slop? If they index AI generated articles, it is just not sustainable, right?

zetanor

I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of things I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocably leaks your e-mail address: https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email (2009)). What's a lot harder to overlook is that the IA brazenly hosts warez on clearnet and pulls off stunts like the COVID "emergency library". I'm all for ending copyright, but does any of that really need to be linked with the Wayback Machine? Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a unique(ly valuable) source of information and history. It's not my call, but it seems strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism. What happens when some stick-up-the-ass company—whose stuff is probably in hundreds of different collections—decides it really wants a payday?

foo42

Internet Archive feels like an important... well, archive, yet I often worry about the load, financial and potentially political, which is put on it when people use it as a workaround for pay-walls, as is often advocated on HN

abeyer

"Keep running" is interesting phrasing, given that wayback has been serving me nothing but some mix of timeouts, 429 errors, and "Temporarily Offline" messages for weeks.

TekMol

I still don't get how copying copyrighted content to your own website and then asking for donations can be a legal business model. Nor how it can be morally justified. I get that many people like such an archive to be around for consumption. Me too. But, keeping emotions aside, I can't find a justification to violate the rights of creators. I'm sure many people here will have the knee-jerk reaction to immediately downvote this question. But I know there are also thoughtful people on HN. If some of you have ideas about the legal and moral justification for archive.org's actions, I would like to hear them.