How do you keep your writings digitally accessible for as long as possible?

[Raphael]

So, suppose I've written a text that I quite like, or perhaps I'm currently in the process of doing that. Let's assume for a moment that the internet, and technological society in general, stay around for a while. Suppose I'd like the idea of my text being accessible to people for as long as possible. Even after I die. In fact, if I should, for some reason, die sooner than I hope, for as long as possible after my death.

What's, then, the best way of going about this?

The "obvious" answer would probably be, put it on a website or blog. But many of the providers for these seem to take your stuff down if they don't hear from you for a while, even if you're on a free plan (and my blog's current version is on a paid plan).

For a while, I thought about self-publishing, but apparently even there, being dead might lead to your stuff being taken down.

Any ideas?

[zompist]

I'd underline the idea that anything you get for free can't be trusted. Companies will happily discontinue a free service, or "lose" your data. Other people's websites can go down. (In fact, this is a good time to remind people not to make the ZBB their only data storage for their conworlds and conlangs. Though I'm not planning on doing anything rash, back up your own stuff!!)

FWIW this is relevant to me too. I pay for hosting on zompist.com, the ZBB, and Almeopedia, but I use wordpress.com for free. I want to keep my website available for years after I die, but I don't plan on blogging while dead, so I don't care so much if wordpress eventually goes kaput.

The Internet Archive is often our only way to look at old sites. They're way more reliable than for-profit companies, but their UI is pretty wonky, and they're not great for discoverability. (That is, you can generally find something only if you know it's there.)

To be sure, you want to pay for access. This involves two things-- hosting and domain registration. (These can be bundled together, but you do want to make sure both get renewed.) Domains are pretty cheap, $10 to $20 per year. I just checked Bluehost, which is currently offering hosting for $3 a month, but that may not last; it used to be $10 a month. So you're looking at $46 to $140 per year.

That makes of course $460 to $1400 for ten years. Find someone not-dead to make sure the fees are paid, and you're covered. Admittedly this starts to look expensive if you wanted a hundred years. Instead of a not-dead person, you could use PayPal.

Or if you trust your not-dead person enough, have them move your stuff from (say) wordpress.com if they're bought by Elon, to a new free website.

Maybe it's worth pointing out that print books can easily last a century, and you can get one for $10 or so. (I.e. self-publish on Amazon and buy an author copy.) Again, discoverability low; but probably the cheapest option. Give it to a young relative who likes you enough not to throw it out.

[Raphael]

Thank you, zompist, that's very informative!

Give it to a young relative who likes you enough not to throw it out.

Problem is, I'm the youngest member of the parts of my family with whom I'm in contact.

[Torco]

death and the internet is a fascinating topic: the internet has not tasted death yet, not really, in the sense that most people who have used the internet have probably not died. but this will change in 30, 40, 60 years. we're all going to be dead by 2100, more or less. will the internet be a garden of the living, where the dead are forgotten? cause like, the facebook pages of those i've loved and now are dead still exist, and i don't think people are gonna love it when their dead are deleted from the record so that facebook can save a bit of datacenter. maybe it'll become more like a necropolis. you know, "in 2300, 90% of social media profiles are of deceased people".

man, this makes me think like... would a text-archive service be economically viable? like, pay me 50 bucks and i'll give you, whatever, one gig of text <a gig of text is basically infinite text> that i'll keep alive and hosted in libraryofthe.dead/yourname.html forever. text is also very compressible, sooooooooooo i don't know, man.

ofc I don't know if 50 bucks is the number, but hosting one gig of text for one year is not, as I understand it, very expensive, and thus there is an amount of capital such that it will yield sufficient rent for it to basically keep that gig hosted indefinitely, i.e. until there is no more internet because of nuclear war, or until capitalism is abolished and there's no way to make money produce rent forever. sure, people querying those archives will also cost something, but i anticipate that most of this archive would get a few hits a year, on average.

myself, sadly, all I have are notebooks and google docs. notebooks in english, no less... it's very likely that they'll be lost to time forever. shadows and dust, i suppose. <puts on the soundtrack of the movie gladiator>

[zompist]

man, this makes me think like... would a text-archive service be economically viable? like, pay me 50 bucks and i'll give you, whatever, one gig of text <a gig of text is basically infinite text> that i'll keep alive and hosted in libraryofthe.dead/yourname.html forever. text is also very compressible, sooooooooooo i don't know, man.

I wouldn't trust techbros to do this... they are basically short-term thinkers, so they'd be figuring out a way to monetize it, and then dump it five years later. The best method here would probably be to fund the Internet Archive higher and let them offer the service. They're in it for the long term, and it would be a small fraction of their data.

For really long-term storage, anything electronic is going to be a problem. Trying to keep machines and formats from even twenty years ago is a huge pain. But there is a proven long-term solution: cuneiform tablets. Machines fail, paper and papyrus rot, stone wears, but baked clay tablets are still sharp and readable after 5000 years. (Doesn't even have to be cuneiform, but impressing clay works better than inscribing it. You could probably repurpose Linotype fonts, or a typewriter.)

[alice]

But there is a proven long-term solution: cuneiform tablets. Machines fail, paper and papyrus rot, stone wears, but baked clay tablets are still sharp and readable after 5000 years. (Doesn't even have to be cuneiform, but impressing clay works better than inscribing it. You could probably repurpose Linotype fonts, or a typewriter.)

This is also "digital" in the sense that you hold the stylus in your digits while impressing

I'm reminded of the plans by the "Church" of $cientology to oreserve its founder's writings by etching them onto titanium discs and storing them in argon gas in the middle of the desert, or something like that.

[Travis B.]

For really long-term storage, anything electronic is going to be a problem. Trying to keep machines and formats from even twenty years ago is a huge pain. But there is a proven long-term solution: cuneiform tablets. Machines fail, paper and papyrus rot, stone wears, but baked clay tablets are still sharp and readable after 5000 years. (Doesn't even have to be cuneiform, but impressing clay works better than inscribing it. You could probably repurpose Linotype fonts, or a typewriter.)

I can just imagine a typewriter which impresses clay tablets...

[Raphael]

I can imagine someone from some weird offshoot of the steampunk scene actually building that...

[Raphael]

(I just noticed that in the original version of the first post of this thread, I wrote "your" for "you're". I feel so embarrassed now... )

[Torco]

man, this makes me think like... would a text-archive service be economically viable? like, pay me 50 bucks and i'll give you, whatever, one gig of text <a gig of text is basically infinite text> that i'll keep alive and hosted in libraryofthe.dead/yourname.html forever. text is also very compressible, sooooooooooo i don't know, man.

I wouldn't trust techbros to do this... they are basically short-term thinkers, so they'd be figuring out a way to monetize it, and then dump it five years later. The best method here would probably be to fund the Internet Archive higher and let them offer the service. They're in it for the long term, and it would be a small fraction of their data.

quite right, quite right. plus, it's not the kind of thing a venture capitalist is likely to fund, either, so they're unlikely to care. their business is, after all, to get that sweet sweet venture capital.

I don't know about the second part, though... we're still using a lot of old standards, and the internet seems to only be stabilizing. it's possible that in a hundred years, maybe two hundred, websites might continue to run on html/css/js, though with more and more stuff added on. if you mean like thousands of years.... yeah, probably ceramic tablets or bits of glass... then again, it's very unlikely that any one babylonian who wrote a tablet had *his* table last until now.

(I just noticed that in the original version of the first post of this thread, I wrote "your" for "you're". I feel so embarrassed now... )

/me records this in a clay tablet

[xxx]

more and more websites of deceased people freeze or close...
it's better to have a paper than a digital support...

for myself I prefer the engramming on brain (mine)...
for the afterlife of my own life, nothing is better than engramming in the brain of others...

but in fact what's the point to keep an idiolect after the life of its speaker...
what remains of a dream after its dreamer does not dream anymore...

[Torco]

well, yes but conlanging and conworlding objects are... nice! like, i've spent hours reading people's conworlds, or even remembering from my notes conworlds i've myself imagined. dreams are all well and good, but we work to make a thing of aesthetic value, and should those be preserved, it would be a good thing.

[sasasha]

If this were the middle ages a big part of the answer would be "make them good enough for people to want to copy them out painstakingly by hand using inordinately expensive materials".

Perhaps now we need to foster a similar culture of copy-making, a digital monastic scriptorial tradition for the internet era. It takes collective effort to pass knowledge to future generations, regardless of media.

[xxx]

culture of copy-making, a digital monastic scriptorial

this is what data centers do, with a lot of energy...

[rotting bones]

culture of copy-making, a digital monastic scriptorial

this is what data centers do, with a lot of energy...

If it gets published, then Google Books might archive it?

Edit: A better question is how people will be able to find it.

[hwhatting]

If it gets published, then Google Books might archive it?

Edit: A better question is how people will be able to find it.

And if it get's published by a full-blown publisher on dead trees, it will (depending on the country) be put in a national reference library. But again, who except the library data base will know it's there?
The best best way is, of course, to write something popular enough that people will want to read it through the ages, copy it, re-publish it, etc. So, Raphael, just write the next Bible / Iliad / foundational work of philosophy or whatever other field

[Raphael]

Sure thing!

[rotting bones]

You could hire a professional marketer to make your website appear on the first page of Google search results.

[Raphael]

In my financial situation, that's unfortunately about as likely as me commissioning the building of a big pyramid and housing the writings at the center of it.

[rotting bones]

In my financial situation, that's unfortunately about as likely as me commissioning the building of a big pyramid and housing the writings at the center of it.

You could try and optimize the keywords for the algorithm by yourself. I don't know how to do that. It might take some research. If you're not looking for perfect results, I don't think it will be impossibly difficult.