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- Hacker News
- Ah, good, they are also mirroring the page load speed of the internet archive
- Typical for something made in St. Gallen. A sensible web developer from Zurich interested in the topic would have created this website in just a single HTML and an optional CSS file.by trvz
- Very proud of my alma mater town to be a place for this. It’s much needed infrastructure for Europe.by DeadEye2111
- If you are running that thing, and reading this post: just do the right thing and get your own name.by colinmegill
- by moontear
- "Its efforts will initially focus on [...] and collecting the generative AI wave that is currently upon us all."
Why would they want to collect the AI wave ?!
But about time the Internet Archive had a US-independent backup.
by damnitbuilds - There are some real gems in the sea of slop; and as archivists and historians, they shouldn't moderate.by userbinator
- I wonder how long does it take to back it up.by rbanffy
- I might be overlooking something, but is a mirror of the Internet Archive even mentioned as a plan anywhere here? It was my first thought after reading the headline, too, but the website only speaks of archiving LLMs and, vaguely, some other collections, but not, for instance, the Wayback Machine.by Anamon
- > But about time the Internet Archive had a US-independent backup.
Agreed!
> The Internet Archive Switzerland, online at https://internetarchive.ch/, is a newly-formed Swiss non-profit foundation that will operate independently within its national context.
I think the Wikipedia Editors will have to decide whether they will add it to the existing page. The Operations section is still listing only U.S. data centers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Operations
by kinow - Stop complaining about availability. Instead, create a solution.
If tpb dot org can still exist ...
At least these people tried. We need a p2p archive solution ASAP. Before our history is entirely re-written.
by consumer451 - I don’t think the problem lends itself well to decentralization. People have tried to use IPFS et al for this. There were even IA attempts https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-gateway
No one has cracked this one yet.
by arjie - They've been constantly trying to set up P2P solutions. Torrents, DWEB, IPFS, Filecoin, WebTorrent, YJS, whole bunch of tech acronyms. I'm not sure much of it has really caught on?
https://blog.archive.org/tag/decentralized-web/
https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-transports
Third-party attempt:
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK
Turns out it's hard! Or maybe just too niche. But you can also help them today, by seeding some of collections that are available as torrents.
by Intralexical - Oh, good. We need more backups.
The one in Egypt doesn't get updated.
by Animats - Sankt Gallen's more physical archive is worth a visit too: https://www.stiftsbezirk.ch/de/stiftsbibliothek/by red_admiral
- Indeed. And the one in Admont, Austria: https://stiftadmont.at/en/about-the-abbey-library/by woodson
- Huh. I can’t find the actual... archive. It mentions an AI archive less than 10 sentences in, and has a couple of links, but seems void of any actually archived content.by imtomt
- The About Us section states:
> We are a team of change-makers who believe that every helping hand can raise a child and create a better future for them.
Which I found weird. And searching for this phrase yields many site-hits verbatim, which is even weirder. Anyone know what is up with that? Is it some kind of filler text?
Edit: I guess it's from a template, the Contact section is also mumbo-jumbo (address: 123 Fifth Avenue, NY and so on).
by teew - That doesn’t exactly instill confidence, honestly…by malicka
- That website is really struggling. Very tempting to go to a mirror on archive.org to view it :)
This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.
Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.
IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.
I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?
by insom - They use Slack? I am kind of surprised. But I am sure on the plus side, that would also mean having to worry about one less uptime.
- Can you share more about your time at the Canadian one? I feel like there was a big hullabaloo about it years ago, but it's not really clear what they do.by Intralexical
- Relevant blog post: https://blog.archive.org/2026/05/06/internet-archive-switzer...
> Internet Archive Switzerland joins a growing group of mission-aligned organizations, alongside Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and Internet Archive Europe. Together, these independent libraries strengthen a shared vision: building a distributed, resilient digital library for the world.
by input_sh - Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48068333, but got little traction.by rbanffy
- Thanks! Since the submitted URL https://internetarchive.ch/ seems to be down, I've put your link at the top and moved the other to the toptext.by dang
- I was interested in the others, but https://www.internetarchive.eu is a horrible corporate-looking site with a hero image, a boast about AI, a carousel of news that won't scroll with doing its slow scroll animation, a huge "meet the team" section with mugshots and boring profiles, social media links, a newsletter signup form, and nothing to say where the actual archive is.by card_zero
- IA needs to do what Usenet has done. Have a bunch of mission-aligned but unrelated orgs (under different ownership and distributed around the world) that peer with each other, distribute all the content obtained by any of the orgs to each other, but that have no technical channel nor capability to distribute DMCA complaints and takedown requests.
This is (AFAIK) basically how Usenet piracy works. You send your warez to one provider, and that provider instantly replicates them to all the providers they peer with, recursively, until they eventually reach the entire network. When any of those providers get a DMCA complaint, they remove the offending files (as they're required to do by law), but they don't inform other providers that they've received a DMCA notice, so those providers keep serving those files. This makes it much harder to remove data from the network than it is to add it.
by miki123211 - So they should use bit torrent.
IMO personal security would only be improved if we diversified away from "the open web".
"Flood the field" with protocols and pre-shared key networks where we have to generate keys together in meat space, make it too expensive to operate the panopticon.
Everyone putting their eggs in the open web basket, gathering in that public commons means all it takes is one bomb on us all, so to speak.
by y3ahd0g - Usenet is a distributed policy from the ground up.
It’s centralised in the way you describe now that it’s only used for large files / piracy, but it used to me much more diverse.
by topranks - I like it in theory but the IA hosts over 175PB of data. Wonder how many other producers could replicate that data.by cbdevidal