Re: Are websites closing down en masse? (distributed free standards and tools)

[Joseph Turner via libreplanet-discuss]

Hi Paul!

"Paul D. Fernhout"  writes:

> On your question "What kinds of responses have you received to your
> talk from the FSF or other groups/individuals?", I have not received
> any responses I can recall. Beyond other factors limiting
> communications, perhaps shaping standards is just not on most people's
> radar screens?

I think you may be right about that.

[...]

> A lot of "standards" in the past have been proprietary, where
> organizations that promoted standards sometimes charged a huge amount
> of money just to obtain copyrighted versions of the standards
> documents (perhaps with a license fee on top of that for actually
> using the standard). That situation seems to have been improving
> though as far as availability of standards documents.

I agree with you about the importance of open standards.

> But on the other hand, Software as a (proprietary) Service has made
> other things worse. As I discuss in this 2016 essay:
> https://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-software-development.html
> "I recently turned down a job interview with Automattic, that I had
> literally waited months for them to schedule, because they insisted I
> use Slack for the interview and have switched WordPress.org
> development over to using Slack. Automattic used to use IRC and Skype
> for such prospective employee chats and for WordPress.org developer
> chats. I had hoped to add a real-time component to WordPress via
> Node.js and Automattic's socket.io to help make WordPress into a
> premier platform for real-time communications, decision support, and
> sensemaking, and said that in my application. To me, using Slack to
> interview with Automattic felt like it would have been significantly
> inconsistent with my stated goals for my work there. Readily agreeing
> to use Slack at Automattic just for an interview would also indicate
> tacit approval of Automattic's move to use Slack for WordPress.org as
> if there are not significant consequences for the WordPress community
> (a community which I am part of as a WordPress plugin developer and as
> a WordPress.org Trac participant helping identify and fix a
> significant WordPress core bug). ..."
>
> Ironically, the places I worked instead of Automattic eventually
> started using Slack and I was forced to use it to keep my job
> (although I was not working on communications tools).

In your blog post, you suggest Matrix as an alternative.  Why not XMPP?

Thank you!

Joseph

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Re: Are websites closing down en masse? (distributed free standards and tools)

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the reply and the links and so on.

On your question "What kinds of responses have you received to your talk 
from the FSF or other groups/individuals?", I have not received any 
responses I can recall. Beyond other factors limiting communications, 
perhaps shaping standards is just not on most people's radar screens?


I worked for a time circa 2001 in IBM's XML group who were then refining 
the XSL-FO standard. I was working (as a contractor) on an 
implementation reflecting the standard in part to help debug the 
standard. That standard was mainly about using Formatting Objects for 
printing -- similar to generating a PDF file in some ways, but more like 
doing that using HTML. IBM said back then that they cooperated on 
standards but competed on implementations -- an idea that has always 
stuck with me as interesting for its time.


Before that, I also worked for a time in the late 1980s as a Program 
Administrator for NOFA-NJ (related to organic certification standards 
for agriculture, which thath group was improving locally and also in 
interaction with other NOFA groups in other states and with various 
levels of government).


So  I have some personal experience from a couple different directions 
on how important various standards can be in shaping the future -- if a 
bunch of people decide to adopt them for whatever reason.


While I am all for free software, it may actually be free standards that 
may be making a bigger difference in many people's lives in practice 
(e.g. HTML, XML, JSON, ASCII, Unicode, the Scheme language standard, the 
C++ language standard, email standards, ssh, sftp, Common Lisp, etc.). 
Because if you have a free standard for storing, transforming, 
exchanging, or displaying information, then eventually you can get a 
free implementations to use those standards.


GNU itself is sort-of an example of this -- a project started 
essentially to clone proprietary UNIX as free software. However, UNIX 
was not formally an free standard then, even if source code was 
available. But UNIX was essentially a de-facto standard in terms of 
command-line commands and software APIs.


If the standard itself is proprietary, then you may end up always 
playing reverse-engineering catchup. To maintain vendor lockin, 
companies may change the standard out from under you with new versions 
of their proprietary software that define that proprietary standard.


Granted, free implementations for something (e.g. Python) may also have 
an implicit non-obvious free standard in them for a data format or 
language that they define in a de-facto way, and which may eventually 
lead to other implementations (like other Python variants). SQLite and 
emacs may be in some middle ground where they leverage some standard for 
SQL or Lisp in some new way, innovating around that standard in new ways 
and perhaps defining a new de-facto standard as additions in the process.


A lot of "standards" in the past have been proprietary, where 
organizations that promoted standards sometimes charged a huge amount of 
money just to obtain copyrighted versions of the standards documents 
(perhaps with a license fee on top of that for actually using the 
standard). That situation seems to have been improving though as far as 
availability of standards documents.


But on the other hand, Software as a (proprietary) Service has made 
other things worse. As I discuss in this 2016 essay:

https://pdfernhout.net/reasons-not-to-use-slack-for-free-software-development.html
"I recently turned down a job interview with Automattic, that I had 
literally waited months for them to schedule, because they insisted I 
use Slack for the interview and have switched WordPress.org development 
over to using Slack. Automattic used to use IRC and Skype for such 
prospective employee chats and for WordPress.org developer chats. I had 
hoped to add a real-time component to WordPress via Node.js and 
Automattic's socket.io to help make WordPress into a premier platform 
for real-time communications, decision support, and sensemaking, and 
said that in my application. To me, using Slack to interview with 
Automattic felt like it would have been significantly inconsistent with 
my stated goals for my work there. Readily agreeing to use Slack at 
Automattic just for an interview would also indicate tacit approval of 
Automattic's move to use Slack for WordPress.org as if there are not 
significant consequences for the WordPress community (a community which 
I am part of as a WordPress plugin developer and as a WordPress.org Trac 
participant helping identify and fix a significant WordPress core bug). ..."


Ironically, the places I worked instead of Automattic eventually started 
using Slack and I was forced to use it to keep my job (although I was 
not working on communications tools).


--Paul Fernhout (pdfernhout.net)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of 

Re: Are websites closing down en masse? (distributed free standards and tools)

[Joseph Turner via libreplanet-discuss]

Hi Paul!

"Paul D. Fernhout"  writes:

> Glad to read about "hyperdrive.el" by another poster as one more
> alternative for distributed content. I personally enjoy working on
> software in that area myself sometimes in my spare time.

I welcome you to join our XMPP chat room to share ideas!

xmpp:disc...@conference.ushin.org
https://anonymous.cheogram.com/disc...@conference.ushin.org

> A deeper issue, however, is the need for wide adoption of free
> standards for persistent distributed content (like HTTP became a
> widely adopted standard). While coding is fun and potentially useful,
> such standards are more important for social software than good free
> implementations (even if they ultimately go together and benefit each
> other, and a really good implementation widely adopted can define a
> de-facto social standard).

In IPFS-land, there's https://specs.ipfs.tech/

> I made a Lightning Talk for LibrePlanet 2022 related to that issue:
> https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/lightning-talk-free-libre-standards-for-social-media-and-other-communications/
>
> And I say there, I think helping define and promote such free
> standards for free distributed content and related tools is a valuable
> role the FSF could play in fostering a more libre planet.

Thank you for sharing!  What kinds of responses have you received to
your talk from the FSF or other groups/individuals?

> Some related content by archive.org:
> https://blog.archive.org/tag/distributed-web/

The first link on that page is to the Dat Project, later renamed to
Hypercore, now .  Our project, hyperdrive.el, is
an Emacs interface to the free software libraries released by Holepunch.

Warmly,

Joseph

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Re: Are websites closing down en masse? (distributed free standards and tools)

[Paul D. Fernhout]

A search on "average lifespan of a web page" (and similar) produces 
estimates ranging from forty days to just under three years (including 
an estimate supposedly derived from archive.org at some point). So, in 
general you are right that most web pages don't last very long, but this 
is not especially a new thing.


Although I can wonder if there are recent trends that might make this worse?

Part of the issue may be that Google tuned its results several years ago 
to prioritize recent content over older content (i.e. "Freshness 
Signals"). Also, social media companies tend to promote new posts. 
Partially as a result, most web pages of various sorts get their 
greatest number of views in hours or days after they are posted. Thus 
there are diminishing financial returns to advertising-funded content to 
keep it up past a few days. Website design companies also make money 
promoting "refreshes" to their clients every two years or so. So, there 
are a lot of obvious financial incentives for various actors to put up 
new web pages and fewer incentives to keep up old ones.


That said, I personally like the idea of permanent URLs. I try to keep 
webpages up that I create at the same URL. Some have been up for over 
twenty-five years. But at some point, after I pass away (or just enter 
old-age and perhaps poverty), will someone else want to keep those 
websites up? Priorities by individuals and communities can change over time.


One suggestion I've seen is for "permanent" URLs is to typically 
including a date of creation in URLs for things like blog posts. Then 
even if you change your content hosting platform you can more easily 
keep up the old URLs. But all too often I see websites redone with all 
the old content discarded or moved so old links are broken.


Methods using the hash of content as a link may help preserve public 
content if we have more distributed systems. This is because the content 
is not tied to a specific domain that may expire or a specific server 
that may be retired.


Archive.org and similar are amazing resources for keeping old content 
available. Wikipedia has some interaction with them to provide 
archive.org links for items linked from Wikipedia. I try to ensure 
content I put on the web on personal sites is archived there. But, while 
I hope archive.org ans similar will prosper for decades to come, there 
is no guarantee that archive.org will be around a long time either due 
to risks related to funding issues, technology issues, management 
issues, and/or legal/political issues.


I like email as a way to personally archive some forms of content. It's 
been sad over the years to see Mozilla short-change Thunderbird 
(implicitly a distributed content system) in favor of Firefox (generally 
used to access centralized content) with how they have spent about a 
billion dollar a year they have gotten from Google and similar funders.


Glad to read about "hyperdrive.el" by another poster as one more 
alternative for distributed content. I personally enjoy working on 
software in that area myself sometimes in my spare time.


A deeper issue, however, is the need for wide adoption of free standards 
for persistent distributed content (like HTTP became a widely adopted 
standard). While coding is fun and potentially useful, such standards 
are more important for social software than good free implementations 
(even if they ultimately go together and benefit each other, and a 
really good implementation widely adopted can define a de-facto social 
standard).


I made a Lightning Talk for LibrePlanet 2022 related to that issue:
https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/lightning-talk-free-libre-standards-for-social-media-and-other-communications/

And I say there, I think helping define and promote such free standards 
for free distributed content and related tools is a valuable role the 
FSF could play in fostering a more libre planet.


Some related content by archive.org:
https://blog.archive.org/tag/distributed-web/

--Paul Fernhout (pdfernhout.net)
"The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies 
of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."


On 12/3/23 22:53, Akira Urushibata wrote:

Recently I feel I frequently encounter defunct links.  Links to
external material toward the bottom of Wikipedia articles often turn
out to be unavailable.

I don't know if there is any empirical data on this.


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Re: Are websites closing down en masse?

[Joseph Turner via libreplanet-discuss]

Hi Akira!

Akira Urushibata  writes:

> Recently I feel I frequently encounter defunct links.  Links to
> external material toward the bottom of Wikipedia articles often turn
> out to be unavailable.

[...]

> One possibility I can think of is that hosting services are somehow
> affected by inflation, higher interest rates and staff cutbacks at IT
> firms.  If anybody has better insight on the matter I'd very much like
> to learn.

I don't know why websites might be disappearing more rapidly nowadays,
but I view it as an opportunity to consider peer-to-peer alternatives
which are more resilient to data loss.

For backing up existing websites you encounter on the web:

https://archiveweb.page/

For a peer-to-peer personal websites managed in Emacs:

https://ushin.org/hyperdrive/hyperdrive-manual.html

[ Disclaimer: I am one of the maintainers of hyperdrive.el ]

Thank you!!

Joseph




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Re: Are websites closing down en masse?

[Paul Sutton via libreplanet-discuss]

Hi

I am not too sure if my experience counts here,  but yes I agree there 
are a fair number of broken links out there.


I have maintained my own website / blog for a number of years. For a 
long time this ran on Wordpress, until the person who maintained the 
hosting was no longer able to carry on.  The website was therefore 
lost.   I moved to writefreely which uses (personaljournal.ca)


In both cases I could post links to posts on forums, etc, as part of the 
post,  clearly if the linked post was on word press the link would 
fail.   I think other would link to my posts too.


With my current blog,  I post about local football team training, I am 
starting to try and purge old posts.  I feel  there is no point in 
keeping an old post that is just there to remind people of a training 
session 2 or 3 weeks ago, let alone months. So I just delete the post.


On a similar note,  If I share an update say a debian point release for 
10.x why keep this beyond the life of that OS.


I did set up a team blog on paper.wf (which again is hosted on 
writefreely.  however this site also stopped working, so my site was lost.


If there is a protocol on what we are meant to do, I am not aware of it

But yeah it does seem to be a problem.

If a website is commercial, then that company has the funds to keep an 
archive for example, projects, individuals do not always have the 
funds,  so if funds run low,  then projects go if it means that person 
can pay for food, rent, clothing etc.


Perhaps this is why archive sites are important.

It is difficult,  I guess in terms of wikipedia posts, someone has to 
maintain the articles.


Paul


On 04/12/2023 03:53, Akira Urushibata wrote:

Recently I feel I frequently encounter defunct links.  Links to
external material toward the bottom of Wikipedia articles often turn
out to be unavailable.

I don't know if there is any empirical data on this.  I can provide an
example from a page I help maintain.  From what I see here I am pretty
sure that sites are closing down or pages are being culled en masse
for some reason:

https://netpbm.sourceforge.net

The ahove URL is the introductionary web page for the Netpbm software
package.  At the end of the page is a list of translations of the same
into various languages.

In early May this year I found out that out of 31 translations,
6 were not available:

   * Russian
   * Malay
   * Indonesian
   * German
   * Polish
   * Belarusian

A recent survey (late November) showed that 4 more translations
have disappeared:

   * Spanish
   * Urdu
   * Greek
   * Estonian

Out of 31 translations 10 or 32.5% have disappeared.  Only 21 remain.

There must be an explanation for the rapid loss of sites and pages.

Some sites hosting the translations look unrelated to system software.
Netpbm is well-known and links in the official Netpbm document pages
cause search engines to elevate the status of the liked pages and
their links.  In other words some people add the translations to their
sites for SEO.

One possibility I can think of is that hosting services are somehow
affected by inflation, higher interest rates and staff cutbacks at IT
firms.  If anybody has better insight on the matter I'd very much like
to learn.

Thank you for reading.

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Re: Are websites closing down en masse?

[Laurent Lyaudet]

   Hello,
   Le lun. 4 déc. 2023 à 18:02,
   <[1]libreplanet-discuss-requ...@libreplanet.org> a écrit :

 Send libreplanet-discuss mailing list submissions to
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 Today's Topics:
    1. Are websites closing down en masse? (Akira Urushibata)
 
 --
 Message: 1
 Date: Mon,  4 Dec 2023 12:53:57 +0900 (JST)
 From: Akira Urushibata <[6]a...@wta.att.ne.jp>
 To: <[7]libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org>
 Subject: Are websites closing down en masse?
 Message-ID: <[8]2023.12.04.12.53.56.980948...@afu.wta.att.ne.jp>
 Recently I feel I frequently encounter defunct links.  Links to
 external material toward the bottom of Wikipedia articles often turn
 out to be unavailable.
 I don't know if there is any empirical data on this.  I can provide
 an
 example from a page I help maintain.  From what I see here I am
 pretty
 sure that sites are closing down or pages are being culled en masse
 for some reason:
 [9]https://netpbm.sourceforge.net
 The ahove URL is the introductionary web page for the Netpbm
 software
 package.  At the end of the page is a list of translations of the
 same
 into various languages.
 In early May this year I found out that out of 31 translations,
 6 were not available:
   * Russian
   * Malay
   * Indonesian
   * German
   * Polish
   * Belarusian
 A recent survey (late November) showed that 4 more translations
 have disappeared:
   * Spanish
   * Urdu
   * Greek
   * Estonian
 Out of 31 translations 10 or 32.5% have disappeared.  Only 21
 remain.
 There must be an explanation for the rapid loss of sites and pages.
 Some sites hosting the translations look unrelated to system
 software.
 Netpbm is well-known and links in the official Netpbm document pages
 cause search engines to elevate the status of the liked pages and
 their links.  In other words some people add the translations to
 their
 sites for SEO.
 One possibility I can think of is that hosting services are somehow
 affected by inflation, higher interest rates and staff cutbacks at
 IT
 firms.  If anybody has better insight on the matter I'd very much
 like
 to learn.
 Thank you for reading.
 --
 Subject: Digest Footer
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 End of libreplanet-discuss Digest, Vol 164, Issue 1
 ***

   I have not seen a speed-up of "links death".
   But the links I consult daily are mostly "new".
   Fortunately, most of the interesting links are on the Internet Archive.
   Sometimes, when I find a nice link, I verify that it is in the Internet
   Wayback Machine just in case.
   Best regards,
   Laurent Lyaudet

References

   1. mailto:libreplanet-discuss-requ...@libreplanet.org
   2. mailto:libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
   3. https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
   4. mailto:libreplanet-discuss-requ...@libreplanet.org
   5. mailto:libreplanet-discuss-ow...@libreplanet.org
   6. mailto:a...@wta.att.ne.jp
   7. mailto:libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
   8. mailto:2023.12.04.12.53.56.980948...@afu.wta.att.ne.jp
   9. https://netpbm.sourceforge.net/
  10. mailto:libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org
  11. https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
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Are websites closing down en masse?

[Akira Urushibata]

Recently I feel I frequently encounter defunct links.  Links to
external material toward the bottom of Wikipedia articles often turn
out to be unavailable.

I don't know if there is any empirical data on this.  I can provide an
example from a page I help maintain.  From what I see here I am pretty
sure that sites are closing down or pages are being culled en masse
for some reason:

https://netpbm.sourceforge.net

The ahove URL is the introductionary web page for the Netpbm software
package.  At the end of the page is a list of translations of the same
into various languages.

In early May this year I found out that out of 31 translations,
6 were not available:

  * Russian
  * Malay
  * Indonesian
  * German
  * Polish
  * Belarusian

A recent survey (late November) showed that 4 more translations
have disappeared:

  * Spanish
  * Urdu
  * Greek
  * Estonian 

Out of 31 translations 10 or 32.5% have disappeared.  Only 21 remain.

There must be an explanation for the rapid loss of sites and pages.

Some sites hosting the translations look unrelated to system software.
Netpbm is well-known and links in the official Netpbm document pages
cause search engines to elevate the status of the liked pages and
their links.  In other words some people add the translations to their
sites for SEO.

One possibility I can think of is that hosting services are somehow
affected by inflation, higher interest rates and staff cutbacks at IT
firms.  If anybody has better insight on the matter I'd very much like
to learn.

Thank you for reading.

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