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- Hacker News
- I'm quite surprised they havent also adopted a high paying sponsorship model. If they had something and large hosting providers were pressured into sponsoring them by customers they'd have no funding issues.
Also why arent they on opencollective? Surely thats a no brainer!
by esskay - Who's paying?
- 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.
by colesantiago - Truly stunning that they omitted this information.by lukeify
- I click through to a few links and cannot find who is doing the matching
- 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
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...
by Cider9986 - I also think archive.today is superior to web.archive.org as it breaks less when archiving sources. It's a shame Wikipedia blacklisted it now as an archive source.by botanical
- 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.by qingcharles
- Yeah but they're a sanctioned terrorist organisation, so if you donate to them your bank account will be frozen and you'll go to jail.
Edit: of course you should donate Monero
by mitxela - 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.
by LeoPanthera - 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 : ).by pm90
- I read that Internet Archive keeps 2 copies of all their data. Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy, mostly IMO because of incompetent management. They pay their node operators, the guys that actually maintain the hard drive space, $1.35/TB/mo to store data. (However it costs Storj 1.8x that because of erasure coding). They still have way more available capacity going unused, so it's likely they could lower the payout rate even further and have talked about doing that.
Internet Archive could buy Storj, probably for not much, keep 1 copy of their archive on the IA custom server setup they have now, keep the other copy on Storj, and free up half of the IA disk space. Storj automagically uploads data to 54 nodes, any 29 of which can reconstruct the original data (54/29 is where the 1.8 expansion factor occurs).
by prirun - The Internet Archive can store data in perpetuity for ~$3/GB one time (estimated based on recent AI driven hardware inflation, used to be $2/GB).
https://blog.dshr.org/2026/01/internet-archives-storage.html
by toomuchtodo - Isn't storj a crypto thing? I don't think they'd want to be involved. I get the sense they are idealistsby brokensegue
- Maybe they could start a Archive@Home project for volunteers to donate unused disk space for the greater good.by riobard
- The major problem with the (low) payout on Storj is that 29/54 node requirement is still too high for reliable long-term data retention.
Also, even if you live in the least-expensive electricity places in the world, residentially it will cost you more in electricity to keep those platters spinning 24/7 [than the payout].
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It is popular in the hobby cryptomining community to replace your under-desk spaceheater with a Monero mining rig (I also do this), and then only run it during wintertime (b/c it is effectively free mining, if you were already going to be running a resistive spaceheater).
Unfortunately, this cryptomining solution doesn't lend itself well to distributed-datastore cryptos because they are offline the majority of the year (i.e. files inaccessible).
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As a part-time miner since 2012... I really wanted to like Storj, but if you want to get paid to replace your spaceheater at home, mine Monero on surplus CPUs (for reference: new $500 Ryzen798003xd mines at 5.5khashes/s; obsolete i5 still gets 3.8kH/s). Storj is in bankruptcy for fiscal reasons due to its impossible logistics.
- "Storj, the decentralized storage service, is currently in Chap 11 bankruptcy,"
"Internet Archive could buy Storj"
Insanely convoluted solution that only someone with crypto-brain would ever come up with. You are really suggesting the Internet Archive should buy a bankrupted crypto company so they can store their data? What?
by 01284a7e - 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.by arjie
- 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?by eru
- They posted on X about supporting this when someone was spamming them with requests
- I was looking for some CNATRA (US naval aviation) unclassified, non-distribution-controlled training manuals and noticed that the newest ones had been deindexed when they were put behind authentication.
Stop hiding public data and I might reconsider.
by anilakar - Yesterday I discovered that WayBackMachine appears to be serving 429s to all Chrome-based browsers, across all network connections. Using Firefox (or a firefox UA) fixes it. I assume this is a temporary situation, or even by mistake, but underscores that archive.org is getting creaky and hard to actually use.by jcrawfordor
- Yeah they are more than happy to allow my VPN traffic to access these donation pages, but the second I try to access anything, it's a blanket 429 to anything I try to go to. Why would I donate to something I can't access?by Drupon
- 2:1 by who? That is not written.
These types of schemes ring very poorly in my head for charity.
If someone has the ability to give 2$ for every 1$ I give, why are they only giving on contingence?
Just give the money!
by tossandthrow - Just like my local grocery store.
They'll ask me to round up my purchase to help feed the hungry. Why can't they not invest in all the infrastructure and systems to support this, and just donate a few nickels and quarters themselves. Plus they have the food to give.
by zikduruqe - Also, it allows the matching party to directly gauge and give along the lines of true public interest, and not waste their money on something nobody cares about.
- The idea is that if I have $200,000 to give to a charity and I give $200,000, my $200,000 yields $200,000 for the charity.
If I say I’m going to match other people’s money 2:1 and that convinces people donate $90,000, my $180,000 yields $270,000 for the charity. I’d probably have written off the 200k anyway and just toss in the rest after, or throw it at another good cause.
by DrewADesign - I've read a theory somewhere (too lazy to find the source, sorry), that people tend to care more about a cause that they have already donated to. Possible explanation is trying to avoid wasting money: "if I already spent money on this, it better be successful, or else my money will be wasted".
If it is true, there is a value in getting people to donate something, however small, because it makes them more likely to donate or help in other ways in the future.
by vova_hn2 - > These types of schemes ring very poorly in my head for charity.
These types of schemes are so common as to basically be universal. You'd probably be hard pressed to find a major charity that hasn't participated in something like this.
by bawolff - In another charity, I offered the 1:1 match. My reasoning was
0/ marketing
1/ credibility. Someone wealthy thinks the charity is important
If you publicly give $2m, people might think, that’s probably enough… no need to give more.
If you quietly give $2m usd and a tree falls in a forest…
by itake