> With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records
Don't worry, these sites probably moved to some other location - after all a website only exists while the owner has a stake in it (and is paying for that dns record + hosting/traffic)
> It's what happens when a place that was supposed to be free and decentralized has become the exact opposite
This is where you lost me. Wayback machine is a centralized repository.
A decentralized system would not have prevented data loss any better without burdening peers with shit they rightfully don't want to host. Nobody wants the cost of hosting anything but their own, and only their own, content.
The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.
The centralization of the web through a for profit oligopoly is not the same as having a central respiratory of data by a non-profit.
One of those destroyed net neutrality and most online free speech, the other is a charity trying to be the last memorial of it.
> The only way you're getting anyone to host things from the past is for there to be an incentive. The only incentive possible is a centralized repository.
What about the incentive of keeping a somewhat thrustworthy and complete digital historical record? Is that worth nothing outside of its sheer monetization potential?
Try doing that outside of the FAANG dominance and you have some work cut out for you because they've spent the last decades either buying up any prospective "competition" or straight up marginalizing it into irrelevance.
Which is, to state it again, the antithesis to what the web was supposed to be, it started as a scientific venture [0], it inspired a whole new way of looking at the world and our minds in it [1].
Profit incentives came only later, they were not inherint to this space, they invaded it and took it over.
Yes, I'm romanitizing a lot of idealism here, but I think it's important to remember that era and mindset of the early web.
It's important to remind people that the current web was neither the goal nor has it still much to do with the web of the old, a place of counter-culture, not of corporate mainstream pushing overwhelming government messages while keeping more tabs on you than even the Stasi could ever dream about.
If not satire: especially in the early internet, sites were university hosted. It was not uncommon for a site to live at, for instance, http://galadriel.mathdept.universityname.tld
The web server could either be a forgotten SUN pizzabox in a closet somewhere, or the new-fangled http 1.1 thing where you could have several domains on the same server! Crazy, I know!
It was not uncommon for these early relics to just chug along unatteneded for years after anyone even know what they were for, and no one cared much either.
If a DNS record disappeared, the server may still have been running for years, but effectively nobody would have known how to access it.
As a sysadmin at a university in a former life, it's also very hard to kill those things when you know where they live
Often it's easier to just migrate that directory to the new web server if there's nothing insecure in there, lest you generate a call from some faculty member to the Chair's office that ends up landing in your inbox
Don't worry, these sites probably moved to some other location - after all a website only exists while the owner has a stake in it (and is paying for that dns record + hosting/traffic)