The Permanent Federation

Thoughts on the future architecture of a permanent internet archive, and how we can start in small incremental steps.

Fedwiki on IPFS is an ideal combination to start creating the Permanent Web. Below is an early audio-note outlining the concept.

One way of acheiving this is to look at creating a new way to store Fedwiki pages on IPFS and implementing this storage on existing Node Wiki Servers.

http://audioboom.com/boos/3834890-the-permanent-federation.mp3 This recording was made at Blighty Coffee House in London, by fortyfoxes, on Nov 20, 2015 at 9:43 AM - audioboom

This IPFS Fedwiki Backend would therefore be common to both public web servers and local servers that you might run on embedded devices and laptops.

Here we discuss how we might structure the IPFS "file system" to serve Fedwiki pages and integrate this with Standalone JavaScript Apps.

# See also

What is the permanent web? Why is it important? Here we have an initial discussion of the permanent web, and how we can start creating it with a mixture of existing technologies.

We imagine how wiki client code might maintain its permanent state in IPFS. We suggest an integration with the journal as currently implemented to create Fedwiki on IPFS.

Thoughts on the future architecture of a permanent internet archive, and how we can start in small incremental steps.

What is the permanent web? Why is it important? Here we have an initial discussion of the permanent web, and how we can start creating it with a mixture of existing technologies.

We consider what services must be maintained in order for our links into Medium to survive. We use Medium the company as an example for any other service offering persistence for creative works.

Here we look at how we might archive our digital heritage, starting with pragmatic baby steps, but leading towards the vision of the Permanent Web and the Way Back Machine.

We've had a number of confusions on federated wiki in the past couple days. Maybe it's not helpful to theorize before we get further. But I believe the biggest confusions stem from no conception of a permanent identity in the system.

Rather than archiving content on a centralized server, we can use the very process of curating and selecting material of interest into one of archiving this material in a permanent way.

The impermanent web is the existing world wide web of HTML pages and broken links - where sites come and go, and links to image, videoa and other web pages are forever being broken.

Taking a snapshot is the process of embedding content from the existing internet (the Impermanent Web) into The Federation.

What format should we save our data, and code in the Federation? We look for the following properties and qualities for any solution we choose: