11 comments

  • foo42 3 minutes ago
    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
  • Cider9986 1 hour ago
    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...

    • LeoPanthera 1 hour ago
      Um. You mean the same site that uses its captcha page to DDOS sites the owner doesn't agree with, and was banned from use on Wikipedia because the owner was modifying the archived pages?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...

      I don't think we should be supporting this random guy, no.

      • progval 4 minutes ago
        > to DDOS sites the owner doesn't agree with

        to DDOS one website, which is doxxing the owner. Not that it makes it good idea, but it's a little more understandable.

      • Cider9986 45 minutes ago
        And archive.org removes perfectly legal content from their accessible archives. Nobody's perfect. The guy running archive.today has done a shit ton of good.
      • andai 1 hour ago
        Well then another guy should provide a technically equivalent and morally superior service ;)
        • markasoftware 44 minutes ago
          I mean, lots of other archive.* sites exist and do the same thing minus problematic behavior, such as archive.is, archive.oh (though maybe some are operated by the same individual...)
          • plorg 36 minutes ago
            Are any of those not run by the archive.today guy? That site has like a dozen aliases.
    • qingcharles 1 hour ago
      Absolutely deserves a donation too. How it keeps running is beyond me, especially as he/she/they keep adding more paywall bypasses on the backend.
  • pm90 1 hour ago
    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 : ).
  • zetanor 16 minutes ago
    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 strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism.

  • arjie 1 hour ago
    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.
    • thechairman12 1 hour ago
      They posted on X about supporting this when someone was spamming them with requests
    • eru 1 hour ago
      I wonder if they could sell you access to a bittorrent tracker? Officially it would be independent of the donations, just an extra service they sell?
      • queenkjuul 25 minutes ago
        They have torrent downloads for a lot of content, I've downloaded almost a terabyte from them via torrent, they're just not bundled, as in you would need to retrieve each torrent file for each item individually, which might still get you a 429 if you automated it idk.

        I've never actually got a 429 using a browser though personally, they do throttle aggressively though

  • sonicrocketman 2 hours ago
    Just posting this so others can be reminded to donate the archive (no association by me, just a fan).
  • totalconfusion 1 hour ago
    Who's paying?
    • killingtime74 1 hour ago
      I click through to a few links and cannot find who is doing the matching
      • Daneel_ 18 minutes ago
        That’s what I want to know before committing too.
    • colesantiago 1 hour ago
      Let's be honest, almost nobody is donating a significant amount i.e. $100K+ to the Internet Archive that would actually keep them alive.

      Everyone wants to scrape and extract from them 100% for free.

      • j16sdiz 8 minutes ago
        No. The question OP ask was.... who is paying for the matching?

        The donation got 3x, sure somebody is paying, right?

        I was planning to donate, and this omission stopped me.

  • qingcharles 1 hour ago
    Just donated. Appreciate the reminder.
  • akudha 1 hour ago
    How do they handle AI slop? If they index AI generated articles, it is just not sustainable, right?
  • crewman9 1 hour ago
    Yeah, _no_

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

    • LastTrain 1 hour ago
      That is Internet Archive Europe, which is independent from Internet Archive
    • eru 1 hour ago
      Interesting. How is ClimateGPT linked to archive.org, and why do you object to it?
      • kalleboo 1 hour ago
      • stonogo 1 hour ago
        ClimateGPT is built by Erasmus.AI, which says "Built by Erasmus.AI on behalf of the ClimateGPT Foundation, and supported by the Internet Archive Europe,".

        Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive founder (and board chair), is on the board of Erasmus.AI.

        It does seem weird to rattle the donation box because hosting costs are going up while shooting money at the prime cause of hosting costs going up.

        • LastTrain 1 hour ago
          They are independent organizations with separate funding.
          • crewman9 40 minutes ago
            then why did the main IA account post about this https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11721950124572...

            and it's darkly funny how HN downvotes this when every single answer on Mastodon is incredibly negative

            • tadfisher 1 minute ago
              It's not funny at all, it's deeply alarming. I'm in the wrong bar.
          • stonogo 42 minutes ago
            Brewster Kahle is on IA Europe's board as well (with Daniel Erasmus, whose baby is Erasmus.AI).

            I'm sure they have separate bank accounts, but let's not pretend these organizations are independent. They're all run by the same little club of friends.

    • RileyJames 1 hour ago
      What should archive.org apologise for in this regard?