Best way to host a website for 500 years?

The world wide web is only 28 years old.

We've had computers for 76 years at this point.

We're discussing this topic in modern English, but if you look back 500 years William Shakespeare wouldn't be born for another couple of generations: vocabulary and grammar have changed a lot since then, and if you look back a further 500 years (to 1021AD) the "English" spoken in those days was a lot closer to Frisian than anything we'd understand.

To get the big picture of what 500 years means ... the oldest surviving writing is roughly 5500 years old. We've had agriculture for roughly 11,000 years. And you're asking for a personal legacy to be legible and usable after surviving a span of time 10% as vast as the existence of writing itself?

Think archival grade materials and ink, then add translations into Mandarin, Arabic, and Spanish -- there's a much better chance of it being readable if you have more than one language. Then maybe add a dictionary, just in case words have fallen out of use. Make multiple copies and distribute them around the world, including tectonically stable desiccated regions that are currently lightly- or un-inhabited and likely to remain so: the criteria for deep disposal nuclear waste repositories are applicable (minus the "deep") bit, so Yucca Flats would do, or the Atacama Desert or the McMurdo dry valleys in Antarctica.

Other comments have given ways to physically archive the webpage. Continually hosting it is a much trickier endeavor. Beyond just keeping the servers up, technologies will shift such that eventually html webpages, servers that talk using tcp/ip, datacenters that connect via fiber cables, etc will all be deprecated.

That said, if we have a very liberal definition of the word "website" to include any successor technologies where a device can be used to request a document, given an identifier, that looks recognizably like your webpage, this is doable. What you really need is an institution that you can trust to keep existing and to keep the necessary upkeep of your website as part of its mission.

The main institutions I can think of that have lasted for 500 years unbroken are churches and elite universities. If you were able to convince the Pope to decree that the church should keep hosting your webpage in perpetuity, that would likely work, but persuading him of that sounds very challenging. That said, universities are used to accepting gifts with sometimes eccentric strings attached. The gift will probably need to be large; but I imagine a $1B donation to Harvard under a condition that they continue to host and update the page as needed would likely work. Getting that sort of money is quite hard, but tbh probably easier than coming with a way of guaranteeing that your direct descendents keep the webpage up.

  I met a traveller from an antique land,
  Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
  Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
  And on the pedestal, these words appear:
  My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
  The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

— Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias"

Go to a big legal firm that's been around for at least a few hundred years. With them, set up a trust with a sufficient endowment to be run indefinitely (barring total societal or economic collapse), with the mission of maintaining this specific website in accessible format (including updates and format shifts as necessary).

It will be expensive, but this general structure is already used by various organizations with one mission or another.

Print it out on acid-free paper with a stable, acid-free ink. Have it bound as a hardback, and seal it into a waterproof container. Entrust it to one of your children, tell them to keep it in a safe-deposit box and take it out once a year to share with their children, and to pass it on to their children with the same instructions.

If you have it electronically, the absolute best case in 500 years is that it will be a relatively easy job for software archaeologists or historians to decode, assuming it's been periodically backed up to new media for all those years. The most likely case, though, is that in 150 years, the servers it was stored on, which have not been running for 80 years, will be picked over and/or melted down for precious metal contents by a tinker who wanders between mud-hut villages repairing their ancient metal pots in exchange for dried fish.

Probably unpopular answer: you could store your messages to the future in the op_return field of a series of small bitcoin transactions. I wouldn't recommend making this the only egg in your basket but I think there is a non-zero probability the blockchain history will be preserved even if the currency isn't used any longer, kind of like how you can still go see Song dynasty paper currency from 1,000 years ago.

If page is static - engrave it in a titanium plate, possibly as a QR code of sorts and pass it through generations.

Include instructions for reader to publish it to whatever media analog of today's web page.

So basically stay away from technology, get information encoded into lowest and most resilient physical material and rely on future generation to publish and/or update it's content.

Host the content/pages on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/ There's a pretty good chance their collection (and possibly the organization themselves) will be around in 500 yrs. 1 EB in 100 yrs will be trivial to host (probably the price of a loaf of bread), and your content will be accessible by anyone with a copy of that archive.

Really boring answer: Make provisions for it in your will, which likely will mean creating some sort of charitable foundation with the mission of doing this. If the personal page is useful and/or hosts some creative work keeping that alive can be the entire goal of it, otherwise the foundation might have to do some actual charity and the preservation of the page would be a quirk in the statutes.

How do you know what the internet will look like in 500 years? Sites from 20 years ago are broken, you can expect that unless you’re using plain text and html that standards will change in 500 years and people will not be able to access your site.

Then there’s issues with domains. You’d have to setup a trust and again assume we will still be using domains in 500 years. If you use something like S3 then you’ll have to ensure they’re around for 500 years.

My perspective, this is entirely unrealistic.

Look at what has lasted 500 years, and use those media. Websites are not among them.

1) stone 2) books if printed on the right kind of paper 3) metal if it's not something subject to rust

Even if it is possible to make a website that lasts 500 years, I expect we haven't figured out how yet. I'm sure it took people a while to figure out how to make long-lasting tombstones; early North American ones were often made out of sandstone or wood, and are illegible or completely gone now. You may be one of the very first people to give thought to how to make a website that will last that long; what are the odds you will get it right on the very first attempt?

500 years is too long for modern tech. You will definitely need many copies of different types of storage, down to atomic-level records such as DNA. GitHub's Arctic Code or Amazon vault looks like the first Godzilla computers, but you're asking for a "500-years PC".

Perhaps there will be a technology that allows you to write site files in the DNA directly of your children and run a micro-DNA web server in the body, and your grandchildren can surf on your Internet data in the brain.

Hosting isn't so much the issue. You need to create something worth keeping around for 500 years. If you succeed, people will make sure it's available somehow.

Print it in a book, on good archival quality ink and paper. Make a couple of copies stored in various locations in case of natural disaster.

Look the English language is a lot different today than it was in 1621 and with the pace that technology changes I strongly doubt that anything web related will be able to run. (Assuming that civilization will still be standing, they still have a way to power technology)

So, that pretty much leaves ink and paper. That's your best bet, and even then that isn't a sure thing.

I would probably create some type of small self-contained unit, that's battery powered, and can recharge itself via solar panels. I'd have this device periodically try to fetch data from the internet.

Once the internet goes down it goes down, and you'd have the local cached copy.

I'd also have this mystical device print out the entire website in paper form every year or so, and then it would automatically shove the book version of it in a miniature Warehouse.

I don't think electronics are going to function any way similar to they do now in 200 years. But books, particularly picture books will always be readable. We already have examples of this, hieroglyphics are thousands of years old but can still be read and interpreted by modern people even without knowledge of the language they were written in.

Hm. I think your best bet is to make it easy for archive.org to archive.

archive.org will work on making your legacy technology work, as they are doing for flash, for example. Or they will find projects to make that work. That has a higher probability to work, opposed to finding a silver bullet now.

Though, the silver bullet there would be to minimize technological complexity. Make a simple static site with hugo, for example. That's easy to archive entirely.

Nobody can say whether browsers, IP networking, DNS, HTTP will exist in 500 years from now, so aiming for very long-term "hosting" isn't feasible, with browsers the most complex and fragile part. Your best bet to preserve digital text and other data would be to use standards specifically designed for preservation/reuse that made it during that time when we still had multilateral standards development, and that have stood the test of time, such as SGML and XML. Or use plain text/markdown/other Wiki syntax and render to the viewer app of the day and century, the idea being that capturing your text at the intentional authoring stage would be free of delivery concerns and artifacts as best as it can (possible with SGML out of the box). And/or, author/render to a conservative HTML subset without JS and progressive/optional CSS. Or, print it out on acid-free paper with mineral colors.

I work for a university that is over 800 years old, with a library and press (book and journal publishing) that are about 500 years old. The institutions have changed a lot over the centuries, especially the last 200 years.

Probably the best way to get people to preserve your work that long is to make it really outstanding, so future generations will want to preserve it even though technology and institutional governance keep changing.

I've thought about this. Keep it completely static, no back-end server required, minimal front-end javascript, mostly plain HTML.

The key, as many others have said, is to make it easy to copy/archive (on computers, archive.org, etc). A simple set of linked pages (with graphics in widely-used formats, eg JPEG/PNG) is your best bet.

What the stone tablets crowd here misses is that a lot of cultural production today that's very important--major artworks, political speeches, movies, court records--is electronic. This means that by necessity, unless you think that entire corpus will get discarded, future societies are going to develop archival systems capable of indexing and decoding all this information.

Also - storage capacity has grown a lot, and that's a trend I'm betting will continue. Today, entire libraries' worth of books and magazines can be mass-duplicated and carried around on disk drives or USB sticks. What does this trend look like in 500 years?

I also think using open systems and formats has a better chance of survival than proprietary ones, if only because there are more reference implementations for how to convert bits into something people can understand/experience. There's a lot of important stuff written in .doc (MS Word) but my money's on HTML or ASCII, or even PDF if you want long-term survival.

Probably the only way that has a chance of success is some kind of trust fund that will accumulate funds to keep the website in operation, including converting it several times to whatever's in fashion in 100, 200... 500 years.

Or, as some other post has already said, become so famous that people will record everything you've said. Although the first option only requires becoming moderately rich, which may be easier.

Etch it onto a metal disk like this[1] inside a capsule that can survive reentry, pay to have it shot into space with a slowly decaying orbit. Then perhaps arrange to have the reentry hit a pond near your ancestral home in about 500 years time.

1. https://longnow.org/artifacts/rosetta-wearable-disk

I don't know the answer but I'll share a short real story.

We made (me and others) the ENS+IPFS website almonit.eth in 2019. You can access it with a web3 browser or a gateway (almonit.eth.limo).

For a long while I was pinning it in IPFS with my server, but in March this year the project stopped so I killed my daemon.

However(!) -- since the website is so popular, it actually still now, 7 months later, though there is no one pinning it really. It just lives on the fumes of its popularity.

I honestly wonder how long it will continue.

Write a book and distribute it in high enough numbers. Things that seem too big to ever fall today might not exists in even 10 years, let alone 500, that's valid for every tech companies and even tech paradigms, you'd need people to actively migrate your site every XX years

Archive the site into a file, get the strongest radio transmitter you can find, point it at the closest black hole and then just start beaming bits for long as you like.

Some of those RF photons will arrive just outside the event horizon and be bent ~180° to a trajectory that will intercept the earth’s path about the same amount of time in the future.

By then we will have solar-system sized radio receivers that can pick it up (or, to satisfy the doomophiles, ‘land on a dead planet’)

Here's a half serious answer: do not design it as a static object that can withstand the erosion. Design it as a dynamic process that can change itself and adapt to the environment.

Establish some kind of religion or cult or fraternity. Give them your personal webpage as a sacred document that can be passed down with some secret ritual. Develop a community of the admirers.

One example: a shrine in Japan kept the records of ice ridge forming in a certain lake (which they considered sacred). The tradition started around 15c and still continues today. It's one of the oldest climate record at a specific location.

Look at Arweave. https://www.arweave.org/

Taken from their site:

arweave is a global, permanent hard drive built on two novel technologies: the blockweave, a derivative of the blockchain, and proof of access, a custom incentivized proof of work algorithm. These innovations provide truly permanent data storage for the very first time and at a massive scale.

Essentially it is putting files on the blockchain in a permanent manner.

There are some podcasts out there where the founder talks about the details.

20x overspec'd solar panel. No battery. Broadcast a wifi hotspot at minimum radio power. Keep the components cold just above freezing and never allow them to freeze. You can accomplish this by using geothermal engineering to your benefit and burying the device with an appropriate heat exchanger so the planet can regulate the server temperature. Add in high availability and failover by using multiple buried devices connected over ethernet shielded with corrosion and abrasion resistant material at the lowest power and speed settings, then using raft algorithm and heartbeat. Seal everything with heaps of epoxy resin. Cut cable insulation off near where the cable enters the epoxy cube and reseal exposed wire with epoxy. This way water cannot wick into the main epoxy cube.

Get it printed on a physical monument made of metal/stone, put it on property you own, and engage a lawyer to set up the will and property covenants to require its ongoing existence and maintenance.

Our guesses about what the web looks like ten years in advance are likely to be wrong, let alone 500.

As someone who just basically teleported to 2021 from 2013, I can tell you that 99% of my bookmarks are now dead. So, even in 8 years most web sites haven't managed to survive.

I've toyed with the idea of putting money into a trust and having the executors of the trust use the money to maintain stuff like this.

It's more of an institutional solution than a technical one, but I'm personally more comfortable with an institution lasting 500 years than an unmaintained piece of hardware or software.

It's the same strategy used by museums--they take a grant from somewhere (from government, public, or private entities) and use that money to retain expertise and resources required to preserve stuff like the Mona Lisa or a dinosaur skeletons for future generations.

There are several comments here that involve other people doing things over the generations. Printing stuff, reminiscing or reflecting on anniversaries, taking legal and fiscal responsibility, etc etc.

Has anyone here been on the other end of the equation? By which I mean, has anyone here been born into a family with a similar ongoing situation?

The most effective way might be to create a work of art or science or whatever that is of such significance that others are motivated to archive and disseminate or for you. So... a trite answer might be... inspire others to memor(ial)ise you. Good luck with that :)

PS. I initially intended to mention the Rosetta project and I'm glad to see that here. Philosophers, economists, psychologists and many others have written plenty about issues with archiving, definitely worth looking into.

PPS. I'm also very pleased to see a reference to Ozymandias. I was thinking about the Buddhist philosophy that, simply, _suffering exists_. It would be worth examining your motivations. Not that I disagree with them; quite the opposite.

The only way to make something last 500yr is to make it important enough that other people preserve it.

As we saw with Inspiration 4, SpaceX is willing to take commissions, thus:

This might not be the cheapest way, however, if you can engineer a satellite to last 500 years [1], you could then have SpaceX put it up in orbit for over 500 years[2]. Have this satellite broadcast your website via radio [3]. Then setup a trust with a consortium of lawyers to maintain a ground station network that hosts the website on earth's internet.

This way even if the earth lawyers/society fail you, you are still hosting the website technically, just not on earth's internet.

[1] Does anyone know if this is reasonably possible?

[2] https://space.stackexchange.com/a/5599

[3] https://science.howstuffworks.com/question431.htm

You've missed the boat (literally and figuratively), but GitHub's Arctic Code vault would have been a solid solution: https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

Somewhat pricey, but buy a rover and have it sent to the moon. Program it to lay tracks in form of a QR code that contains the URL that encodes the whole website.

2nd hand rovers are somewhat hard to come by. But you wouldn't need all the fancy scientific equipment. Maybe a prototype of the bare rover is available somewhere.

Kudos if you pull that off and have the Moon QR URL website say : "never gonna give you up...".

Create a foundation that ensures it is always copied to the latest media.

It should verify it’s on hosted on multiple sites and the current offline media is working.

Every few years this will have to change.

Every 20 years, annotations might have to be added as language drifts.

Isn't there an 'arrogance' in the premise when we ask these sorts of questions? Not a personal criticism; just an aside from the technical question for a moment.

It's the assumption that we've decided something we created should have permanence.

Similar to billionaires deciding they would like to live forever and trying to make it happen.

There's a beauty to the world, which is we get a short time to contribute, and then we give up our space/resources to make room for someone else. Our ancestors decide whether and what to carry forward.

Thought experiment: imagine it is 1985 and you asked the equivalent question. Something along the lines of: how would I preserve an electronic game/message/piece of media for posterity?

What would the answer be?

Make sure you copy your floppy on to a tape on the commodore 64?

Make sure that you post the message to at least 4 different bulletin boards?

The tech is evolving so fast that a website, or today's hardware, or forms of media will be unrecognizable 50 years from now.

Perhaps the first question is, what will be the equivalent of a website in 500 years?

You can't. No more than you can make a garden last 500 years without people tending to it regularly. Digital has a lot of great advantages, but permanence isn't one. Will DNS even be used in 500 years? Maybe. Will whatever hosting provider you use still exist. Almost definitely not. Will html and css and javascript still be used even? Or will they be something academics study the way we study latin and greek today?

Books, buildings, and art survive 500 years and not much else.

Just use the philosopher's stone, stay alive and host it yourself in 500 years old.

Look up Nicolas Flamel, his house is now the oldest in Paris, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Nicolas_Flamel

Create an artifact, surround it with mystery, and in 500 years it will be either an artifact exposed in the museum, or a relic people will be looking for even in generations.

Some people like to pretend that the philosopher's stone isn't real, but if you visit the catacombs with a radio-isotope detector and locate his remains, you will be convinced it is.

Presumably it was a hot to the touch radioactive meteorite passed down through generations that had been wrapped in lead. When he melted the lead, the transmuted gold fell at the bottom. It was a technology that wouldn't be discovered until Becquerel 500 years later.

Inside this meteorite, which until it was shielded properly, whose path you could back-trace via following the traces of radioactivity, it was discovered by x-ray imagery that it contained a perfect metallic disk with engraved features in its core. The rest is classified, but if you can store your website in a box there, you can rest assured that it will be preserved too.

The Long Now Foundation has spent a lot of time thinking about this. They have designed and implemented clocks built to last 10,000 years. I doubt anyone else has spent as much time and effort solving this problem, so I’d suggest something similar: https://longnow.org/clock/

If you want it live-hosted for 500 years, you need people to host it. Some company. I don't know anyone that will even take your money and lie to you about that.

Your best shot is a simple set of files on a few redundant medium. If you want to get fancy, put a browser on there that will run (presumably emulated) with no network dependencies. Hopefully with a 64 bit time_t.

Create lots of copies. We know some papers/parchments can last 100s of years and are easy to store, so be sure to put some of your copies on paper. Anything current tech is just a guess as to what the future will bother to read and keep storing. (Metal plates, for example, would probably last but are a pain to move and store and are likely valuable melted down and reused)

After that, try to get your copies into institutions you think will survive for hundreds of years. So far, at least from a US/Europe-centric view, that seems to be universities and some churches. Even that's no guarantee - the Vatican library has been sacked a couple of times and had its contents hauled off, so who knows what was lost in those moves. You might try to bet on public libraries, though their track record is shorter.

Only partially joking: start a church that's dedicated to preservation of records.

But really, I think the key is lots of copies, spread as widely as you can.

I think about this a lot, and I prioritize site longevity and compatibility in my framework. To this end, I leverage the Lindy Effect, writing HTML which works with the last 25 years of browsers, starting with Mosaic and Netscape. You want to use only the most basic, least common denominator HTML markup, to improve its chances of not becoming "deprecated".

If you use JS and CSS, it must have abundant feature-checks, and ideally be optional. Your pages should certainly be usable without JS. You probably want to go with static HTML or only the most basic, again, lowest common denominator server-side dependencies, such as SSI.

You must make your site easily indexable, crawlable, and spiderable, so that it can be easily propagated to the Internet Archive and other archiving systems. Many sites I made in the past are long gone at their original URLs but remain accessible via Wayback Machine.

That's all I can think of for now.

Cut the data into the surface of a chunk of highly reflective and stable metal. Lob that into a high orbit. It will blink out your data from on high with nothing more than the incident light of the sun to anyone with a basic telescope, or even their naked eyes if it's big enough.

Obviously the details would be rather complicated. How is the data encoded? Morse code? Maybe ok for 500 years assuming the language it decodes to stays around. You could treat it like the messages we send to deep space and make it only pictograms. But that might take some effort if you are trying to bemoan the complexity of k8s for generations to come. That brings up the question of what are you trying to say? Do you already have something you think is worth saying across deep time? A person could spend their life solving that problem before they even get to the engineering challenges...

This type of question is asked semi-frequently and the answers tend to be around physical preservation.

So here's a thought. Why not build a "Computational Knowledge Bootloader" that contained enough information to build a sequence of computational devices of increasing complexity starting with the absolute basics of math and language.

If we had that, then all of these types of questions of digital preservation could be answered with something like "Go to the website and upload your information into a Tier 20 CKB device. Enter your shipping address and payment information. A collection of etched titanium plates will arrive in 3-4 weeks. Put them in a safe."

500 years later, decoding might look like finding or building up to a Tier 20 CKB device and scanning the plates. If the instructions were standardized, there should be lots of lower tier devices scattered around.

Microfiche is stable for 500 years, you can store the webpage as-rendered and the source code. And you can use a 2D matrix “barcode” with simple error correction to represent digital data more compactly in the microfiche. Colors are generally less stable in microfiche than black and white.

Also, try 1000 year institutions like the Vatican or something.

Get it archived on Archive.org

If you’re worried about translation, then provide another translation of it in technical and Old Mandarin, ancient Arabic, high Latin, koine Greek, Sanskrit, Hausa (Nigerian), and Shakespearean/King James English.

There’s going to be Catholics, Orthodox, random Protestant Christians, Muslims, Confucians, and Hindus in 500 years (plus a lot of Nigerians), and there will be millions of people able to read and understand some of those ancient languages and committed to preserving them.

If you could build a computer that held and displayed the data, you might be able to preserve it - a tablet or handheld device that gets handed down through generations and only activated one a decade or so?

Beyond preservation, though, that's an interesting engineering puzzle - could you fashion a computer intended to operate for 500 years, without replacement parts?

It'd need serious shielding, components that wouldn't degrade, some sort of capacitor based rechargeable power system, connector interfaces designed to be easily modded, and so on.

I imagine such a legacy computer would be durable beyond even advanced military or nasa tech allows for.

https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/the-100-year-computer

Ignoring all the issues with decoding any message after 500 years... Semiconductor based devices will stop working by then due to diffusion. Maybe a large conductive structure that creates EM backscatter/interference that encodes your website? Or perhaps something that attracts lightning strikes and uses them to emit a burst of information.

Also, if your website really does last and remains decodeable that long, and if it is an exceptional occurrence, then it could also become a target for destruction if the winds of culture shift in some way.

See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warn...

Build pyramids no seriously, build low tech giant physical structures that survive the test of time

Write a pernicious AGI whose only goal is to keep the page online, whatever systems it has to subvert (or in extreme cases, turn into paperclips).

If you want to store information for the next billions of years, carve it in a super-material and store it secretly in the Kaapval Craton, so that even when all current continents are gone and a new super continent is formed it has a high chance of survival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaapvaal_Craton) Then again, if people did not find your message in all those billions of years it was so well hidden that they will probably not find it also in a couple of billions of years, but at least it remains

People have been doing this for a while now; in their tombstones. I live next to a cemetery, sometimes I go there and read some. Most are written by grieving families - a couple phrases and that's it. The ones written by their occupants are invariably the most interesting ones.

You could even make it a bit of a puzzle: "There is a secret message in your great grandparent's tomb, but only visible during the Summer Solstice, on sunset". It would require some math and some careful placement, and durable materials. It could be a nice activity for your offspring.

What information would be worth preserving for 500 years that will not be discoverable in 500 years? Any personal information, i can assume, will be like from a stranger to your grandchildren. Honest question.

Priests at Haridwar, India maintain handwritten Bahi Khata (Genealogy register) which has record spanning around 2000 years and they are able to search it in about 5-7 minutes so its pretty robust.

Links: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_genealogy_registers_at_H... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcSyvvreJKs

I can appreciate this desire. Printing my website is basically out of the question at this point. I rely upon people thinking it worthwhile to keep a copy, and I make it fairly easy for people to do so. I distribute on a number of networks, I offer a number of snapshot archives (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/*/philosopher.life), and I make it easy to download a complete copy of the entire site (https://philosopher.life/#Readme), as it's just a single html file. I do ask family and friends to see it as a book they will keep in their libraries, and I keep it very small, almost pure text (I don't want it to be any further a burden than it already is). Some store it on a thumbdrive or even keep it as an e-mail attachment. And, that it is nearly pure text is something that I think is exceptionally useful for this problem, as even if there aren't browsers that will be able to render it (that would be sad), there may be tools that can at least read the source (and, in a way, the site is meant to be somewhat readable from source, though it requires some motivation). I also enjoy the knowledge that there are random copies out there sitting on hard drives. I think it's gonna take some luck too.

500 years ago, the USA didn't exist.

I'd be disinclined to rely on the internet surviving for more than another hundred years; too many influential people would like it to disappear.

I don't really know who my ancestors were, 500 years ago, despite my father researching his ancestry for a decade. I certainly don't know what they might have written down.

If my ancient ancestor had invested 1M in preserving his thoughts, I think I would regard him as incredibly vain, to think I wouldn't prefer the cash over the chance to read his personal page.

If your kids think it is something their kids will want to see, your kids will preserve it (or copy it) and pass it on.

I have old pictures from my great grandparents. I have them on my phone as jpegs. They took no steps to preserve the actual film for 120 years or otherwise figure out how their great grandchildren would see it.

In short, if it’s worth preserving, it will be preserved (or copied to whatever medium is currently in use) by your successive generations. If it’s not worth preserving, it will be tossed and ignored regardless of steps you take.

Who is going to pay for your domain name? I was in jail and luckily had someone pay for one of my domains, but all the others I owned got recycled because I couldn't get to the Internet to pay for them.

How many years in advance can you pay? What does ICANN support? 10 years?

"maximum remaining unexpired term shall not exceed ten years" https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/faqs-84-2012-02-25-en#...

That's a really tricky thought exercise. Legal trusts in most countries have time limits. Businesses come and go all the time. I think you are describing the same dilemma that companies offering freezing/preservation of your body or head upon death/near-death are dealing with. That is probably the business model I would study to find out what countries have the legal structure to support their requirements and thus your requirements. Even then they and their clients are accepting some risk. I suspect you will have to invest some capitol in this if you don't want your future generations to carry on this project on your behalf.

If your time requirements were shorter I would suggest a legal trust and set requirements for trustees to ensure the domain and site are preserved. I would also add instructions in the site itself to have family members preserve the site or even create new domains or methods of presentation. Each generation of family member could then create their own trust and repeat the process through inheritance. Your lineage could essentially leap-frog the system and compensate for businesses going bankrupt or technologies changing assuming they value the site and wish to add to it. I think your future generations would appreciate the ability to update the site. "Keys change, technologies are updated..." -- The Davinci Code

I used to wonder about questions like this, but somewhere along the line they've become unimportant. I'm not sure why that is, or whether that's a good thing, but my best guess is that I've grown less delusional about how much others care about me.

It's an interesting thought experiment to ask how important such a page about your father or grandfather would be to you. It seems much less important to me than my own page. So it will be for others.

Some ideas I don't see yet:

* Launch a satellite into space powered by a fission reactor with excessive capacity. Plan the trajectory so that in 500 years it crashes back to Earth with an inscribed quartz tablet.

* Commit a terrible crime like JFK assassination or Unibomber and make it your manifesto.

* Genetically modify your children (as an embryo) to contain the relevant information in non-coding regions of their DNA.

* Sneak into a fissile waste containment center and put a marble etching in there.

I think we can look to the way we archive any other information, which tends to be libraries and archives. So in the first instance, make sure the Internet Archive has a copy. If you want to be even more sure, find a friendly library of record (British Library, Bodleian, Library of Congress, that kind of thing) and see if they archive digital documents and give them a copy. Perhaps with a financial contribution guaranteeing retention?

I think this question has a much deeper implication. What is going to happen to digital data, period? Think of all the letters between famous geniuses in Physics. Today all of that is locked up in emails on server, password (and possibly 2FA) protected. Will all of this be lost to encryption, even if the "wayback" machine of the exebyte internet manages to waste all that energy on SSDs to save it all????

Such an interesting thing to think about. The implications of (relative to a human life) long periods of time are overwhelming. At some point, even if somehow the information is intact, who will read it, and why? The barrier to entry scales with time, add technology and it probably scales at a geometric rate, for anything which is not held in such high cultural esteem that it is constantly maintained and updated.

Sure, we can play Dungeon (1975) today with relative ease. Most won't. But what about all the other games that probably survived but nobody knows about, because they weren't historically significant enough?

This probably goes for any cultural articact music, writing, paintings.

It becomes lost, if not physically, then in the giant volume of knowledge that exists in the world, but nobody knows about.

A poem, in an ASCII file, on an obsolete file system, in some disk image with an operating system for an architecture not produces in a hundred years, that could be emulated by an emulator for another architecture no produces in a hundred years, now residing on some medium, on some machine, somewhere, all will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Gotta put my product manager hat on - is the problem you are trying to solve "how do I keep a site up 500 years" or "how do I keep my writing and pictures around for my descendents to see in 500 years."

Because if it's the later, the website seems to be a terrible solution to me for a lot of reasons. Figure out what kind of paper lasts the longest and print your stuff on that for posterity.

I have thought of this; thought not unto 500 years but more like -- so my kids can just keep to somewhere to read. My thought process was to start with as much simplification as possible -- plain text. While you are still able to maintain that, perhaps write in something like Markdown -- plain text enough with the formatting enough to separate the sections/content.

Use a tool to convert those to HTML, which can be hosted anywhere or be just drag-n-drop in future once you are no longer maintaining/updating it.

My bet is that plain-text will survive any digital changes, so will HTML.

Just make sure there is someone to take to the next step after you. But it really fizzles out after that, well, individually we are not important enough to be of much trouble to anyone for this.

I started my journey recently and is, I would like to believe, just the beginning and I tried writing it down for my personal website which is 20+ years old and surviving -- https://brajeshwar.com/2021/brajeshwar.com-2021/

Buy a piece of art that is timeless, embed your html on its back. Not sure if it meets your presentation goals but it has good chances to survive.

I still think that baked clay tablets have the best bit retention rate of any media humans have invented. Doesn't take much skill to make or use them, either.

But for 500 years you're probably fine with acid-free paper, archival quality ink, and simple environmental control for storage (e.g., a well-designed box). Might want a nitrogen atmosphere, but it's probably not that critical.

Have the website engraved on stainless steel plates. There are many affordable online services out there that would do that for you.

If your descendants store the plates in a dry attic, they could last 500 years just fine.

But… did anybody ever find something on their attic that was there for 500 years. That is very rare. I would assume that your great-grandchildren will throw them away because they need the space.

Your options are “durable copies” and “lots of copies”. Some out-of-the-box ideas for these:

For durable copies, use clay tablets, or (better, I think) write it in large print (kilometers per letter, preferably) on the surface of the moon.

For lots of copies, put it in every block-chain you can find or write it (say in Morse or in ascii bits) on or in small durable objects that have little inherent value (you don’t want your writing to be recycled for its resource value) such a as glass beads, produce billions of them, and distribute them over the surface of the world.

Launching a pioneer-class probe with the text on it every year or so also may help, in the (not highly likely, IMO) case there’s almost total collapse of society where we have to leave earth and then invent much faster space travel than we have now (so that we can catch up with old, slow probes)

I think your biggest challenge will be to make your progeny interested in reading what you wrote, though. Why do you think they would want to read your page, and not watch videos of adorable robotic kittens?

Given the adoption and direction crypto is going with decentralization, we can imagine some new/future incarnation of the technology to exist, possibly on new mediums.

In short, blockchains don't die. They may become zombies, but they never die. Tokens and profit keep them alive; without, they just go dormant.

Therefore, I would suggest a blockchain called Arweave that delivers the permanence for your website:

"Arweave is a new type of storage that backs data with sustainable and perpetual endowments, allowing users and developers to truly store data forever – for the very first time.

As a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets, Arweave allows us to remember and preserve valuable information, apps, and history indefinitely. By preserving history, it prevents others from rewriting it."

https://www.arweave.org

And Akord offers the product for your children and grandchildren:

https://www.akord.com

If you can get by with just text, pass it down as part of your family's oral tradition. See https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/40/the-memoirs-of-sherlock-holmes...

Set up a trust with Berenberg Bank (Joh. Berenberg, Gossler & Co. KG). The bank was founded in 1590, and has been in continuous operation since then without a change of control. "We advise wealthy private investors and families, often across generations." They have 18 locations, so they're not too big and not too small.

Have your team announce that is a purely temporary solution and will be replaced in an upcoming sprint.

I think to keep it hosted will require tending to the bitrot. We don’t know how the web and computers will change but we do know they will change.

So a succession of people (or, later, robots) need to be incentivised and resourced to maintain it.

A foundation is one idea. But I quite like a viral clause in your will. So, to inherit, your heir needs to (a) maintain your digital legacy and (b) put an equivalent clause in their will, and so on. Maybe it depends on the value of the inheritance but it might be a way to secure a few generations.

Then you could also stipulate that they should do anything they can to use the resources of their time to further secure the digital legacy. You could also make the responsibility always joint and several across all children / heirs.

I fully expect my blog on GitHub Pages to outlive me.

They're stored in the Arctic Code Vault, as well as more replicas than you can imagine, because git, so I could imagine there's very little risk of data corruption, and because of the amount of knowledge stored in this standard format of static HTML, there's strong incentive for people to preserve it and keep hosting it if Microsoft becomes evil again and decides its not profitable. Moreover, if you PGP-sign your git commits with a 4096-but RSA key, you can be fairly sure nobody will edit your commits (perhaps for at least for the first 200 years). I believe the key here is lumping your data in with other high-value data.

Create some kind of annuity/trust that pays a large legal firm to translate and publish your personal page every decade or so.

Below is a poem written in English 500 years ago (Speke, Parrot by John Skelton). The 'web' is less than 30 years old and any I think it's fair to assume that HTML and browsers won't exist in anything like the current form and English will have transmogrified into something unintelligible from current day English.

A cage curyously carven, with sylver pyn,

Properly paynted, to be my covertowre;

A myrrour of glasse, that I may toote therin;

These maidens ful mekely with many a divers flowre

Freshly they dresse, and make swete my bowre,

With, ‘Speke, Parrot, I pray you,’ full curtesly they say; ‘Parrot is a goodly byrd, a prety popagey.’

There's a non-zero chance that there will even be a human population, let alone an internet, within 500 years.

You would probably be best served by backing things up to tape and instilling a culture of copying these tapes every 15-20 years by your decendents :)

The only practical enough way I can think of is:

(1) create static documents in the simplest and most standard lossless (as far as possible) format.

(2) store them on a durable enough, yet simple enough medium. Today that would probably be something simple like an USB stick.

(3) transfer to new medium periodically, and take the opportunity to convert obsolete media files to new formats, if needed (you could keep the originals and each 'generation' as historical reference).

(4) train your children, grandchildren, etc to perform (3) and perhaps to rewrite the instruction in their own words (to cater for technology and language changes)

This also allows for multiple copies for easy backups and to entrust to each descendant individually.

Store it on the Bitcoin blockchain in the OP_RETURN field [1][2]. Note that this is considered an abuse of the system and discouraged, but of all the systems available now, Bitcoin is most likely to still be around in some form in 500 years IMO.

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/39347/how-to-sto...

[2] http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...

500 years is not children of your grand children. If people still have children at 30, your "children of your grandchildren" would be born only 90 years after you, and even if they live to 90, that's only 180 years.

Doing the same math, the 90 year old that sees your web page 500 years from now would have to be born 410 years from now, and at 30 years per generation, that's 13+ generations. At that point, this descendant is related to you as much as a you are to a random stranger from your city.

Look around and see what lasts 500 years: tombstones, statues, family heirlooms.

Your best bet might be to create a ritual, and have your children practice it as part of a religious ceremony!

I recently bought space at forever.com to keep my late relatives photos and documents. It's about $150 for 10 GB. They promise to keep the site up for at least 100 years, paying for storage from the interest on those $150.

Clay tablet writing was invented before 9000 BC and lasted until nearly the common era.

Papyrus was invented before 3000 BC and similarly lasted thousands of years.

Pulp paper was invented around 200 CE in China and spread west around 750 CE.

While printing pre-dates Gutenberg, he revolutionised it by inventing moveable-type in 1439 CE.

Hot metal typesetting, typically used for newspapers, was invented in 1884 CE and lasted until the 1950s to 1980s.

Xerography was invented in 1938 has already started to become less commonly used, even in business settings.

Digital printing become popular in the 1980s to early 90s and is still used but also dropping in popularity.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

HTML 2 was 1995.

HTML 3 was 1997.

HTML 4 was late 1997.

XHTML 1.1 was 2001.

HTML 5 was 2008 onwards.

All of the above are technologies used to record and disseminate human knowledge, and form part of the same technological evolution. I type text right now in much the same way as a linotype operator would. I send this out to interested parties in the same way a letter written with quill might be copied several times and mailed to a group a hundred or more years ago.

There were periods of time a hundred generations long where nothing fundamentally changed about how this occurred! You could write things on clay or papyrus, and that was about it.

Notice anything about those periods of time? They're getting shorter and shorter. They went from thousands of years to hundreds, then mere decades and now individual years.

The WWW is nearly unrecognisable compared to its first iteration and has been around for less than most humans' lifetimes. It wasn't just invented after I was born, it was invented at a time that I was already on my third computer!

It is a beyond hopeless task to attempt to predict what the next 500 years will bring. Thanks to this exponential pace of change, I doubt anyone can predict much past the next 5 years with any certainty...

Are you asking for a free fantasy way to do this, or serious?

For the former, get your thoughts into the constitution of a country or found a religion whose adherents have to memorize your stuff.

For the latter, it's pretty hard. I think the problem is that tech changes. I guess the question is really whether it's the content, or whether it's the delivery mechanism with the content that needs to be preserved. Content itself can be transformed. Current web standards will probably change over time and it will be similar to trying to time travel to a thousand years ago and chat with the locals: language changes too.

Download your website, engrave it on a quartz crystal[0], and hope your progeny have something to read the data from. If you want something that will last ~30 years, then tape and tape drives are a good way to go.

When it comes to web hosting, archive.org maybe? Who knows if they'll exist in 500 years. But in terms of publically accessible webpages from generations past, they seem reliable to me.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/optical-data-storage-squeezes-360tb-on-t...

Just write something worth writing and, if it's good enough, someone will keep copying it.

You won't have certainty that any plan you setup will work and you'll be dead when you can evaluate the success of the operation.

Store the pages on two SD cards with software RAID in a Raspberry Pi with passive cooling and a small LCD display. Submerge the entire thing in clear epoxy, sans the power and USB cords, keyboard/mouse. Create a laminated set of instructions that describes your language, how to use a keyboard and mouse, and how to build a power generator to output the electrical signal needed to power the device. Put all that in a water-and-air-tight Pelican case with silica gel balls & a zinc anode. Bury it in a stone mausoleum in a cemetery that has the bodies of dead rich people.

Some of the best preserved literature is religious text. Give humans incentive (evidently faith is a strong contender here) to remember something to the T and it could easily survive all those 500 years and more.

> “What was there to say? Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.”

Death's End -Liu Cixin - The third novel in the trilogy staring with The Three-Body Problem

Low Tech magazine has a solar powered website... that would cover the hosting - https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-lowte...

After that all you need to do is figure out how to have the domain name registered annually. Not going to lie ... thats a pretty tough problem. You might be able to become a domain name registrar and have a trust administer any fees to ICANN... but that is still fraught with problems.

happy hunting!

The best way is just to think about the website right now in your head. In the future we'll probably have technology that can scan the wave patterns emitted from our brains 500 years ago and restore your thoughts including the website that now you just thought of.

My point I guess is that given the rate of change in the future anything could be possible, therefore, you shouldn't accept plausible sounding arguments or complex fictional stories about Antarctica as an answer, but instead the simplest possible answer about a future when anything could be possible.

Who knows what the next 500 years will bring in terms of communication. I know some artists have experimented with aircraft grade aluminum and titanium as a medium for long-lived artwork.

If I had to do something digital today, it would probably involve prepaying Amazon Glacier https://aws.amazon.com/s3/glacier/ and faster s3 for as long as possible, then whatever long term plans I could muster for continuation- a foundation or trust of some sort?

I can imagine a monument in a very stable location that very securely stored an incorruptible, no-maintenance, solid-state 2-hour presentation about their lives ... that could without any contact (by magnetic field for example) be 'read' and played on a special player.

If my great-grandparents had such monuments - low-cost, no-maintenance, high longevity monuments - I'd certainly want to 'see them in action', once or twice.

If the monuments looked like worthless rocks, they might go unnoticed for a long time. (Maybe there are some already out there!)

It is so funny to see people treat Ethereum and Bitcoin differently from the internet itself. If we think internet won't survive 500 years, so wouldn't Blockchain which lives on top of it.

https://permanent.org/ This is exactly what they claim to be solving. Now if you trust them is another question.

Found a good charity and make sure bylaws require to keep the original family page up.

The oldest UK charity seems 1400+ year old.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/voluntary/page/0,7896,61...

Could be expensive.

Or, create a generation skipping trustworthy similar bylaws. That requires the you put in enough money to make administration worthwhile.

But I feel the question is “will there still be grandchildren in 300 years”. It’s not a given.

What do you mean by "host a personal page"? If the goal is simply to pass on information to your descendents, there are many better ways to do it than setting up a web page on the internet.

If that is a strict requirement, then trying to come up with a single technological solution today that will work forever is the wrong approach and is guaranteed to fail at some point. What you want to do is set up some company/trust/other organization which will keep the site up to date with technological (and other) changes.

If you want it to stand the test of time, use other methods that have provably stood the test of time, like a book. You know that will work. You do not know anything currently digital will work. If this is important to you, I wouldn't mess around with "high tech" solutions. It's a complete gamble and relies on too many different components to work, whereas a book you just have to know how to read. The world can be in another dark age and it will still work. At least while there is light out.

A year ago, GitHub attempted to preserve a snapshot of all public repositories in permafrost in Svalbard [0]. It's hard to say whether the data stored in a public repository on GitHub is going to remain accessible. Still, as far as preservation goes, personal pages stored on GitHub at the time of taking the snapshot might be saved for many generations ahead.

https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

Figure out a way to stop humanity from imploding for 500 years and realize that we're, effectively, like thirty years into using this internet technology thing. So it's quite likely we'll see some really serious infrastructure changes before we get to 500 years out.

My more serious advice is to instead look at the best options for long term persistent data storage and assume that people in 500 years will need to load your site using specialized technology like folks going to the library to view VHSes.

Relevant Tom Scott, How do you make something last 1000 years: https://youtu.be/uhtUYzubRHU

Spoiler: set up a trust.

The internet isn’t a static thing. It’s constantly evolving across multiple dimensions including tech, legal, costs, security, censorship and so on. The real challenge is creating a sustainable legal entity that is an organization that will live for over 500 years and provide solutions to to these problems the entire time to ensure service continuity. While it’s tempting to have a technical conversation, in 70 years everything you now know will be irrelevant, as will you.

Engrave you website on a rock and establish a religion around it

I've thought about a project like this. Although, in my fantasies it was a way to store wealth and provide incentives for revitalization while I am in cryogenic stasis waiting to be thawed out and revived.

Basically, I would write a few modules - Content, secrets, funder, tester, advertiser, executor, and get them running in some cloud deployment.

Content is whatever website you want to host. That part wasn't in my fantasies. Secrets module implements an API to share and store secret information provided the caller has the right keys. Funder is responsible for interfacing with financial accounts and making prudent, low risk, financial decisions. In our time, this would be like using a Robinhood/Webull/whatever account to buy blue chip companies with a long history of steady share prices and dividends. The tester module confirms that all other modules faithfully reproduce their intended purpose and providing functional models with contact information for the executor. The executor is responsible for starting the other modules and providing them with the credentials they need to access the secrets module and get the other credentials they will need to function. Finally, the advertiser module is responsible for hiring freelancers to build copies of the other modules.

The system should aim to reproduce itself every five years or so and to kill itself off, by transferring funds to surviving children, when it starts experiencing operational problems, it begins to amass too much wealth, or it's been around for too long.

When new systems, standards, financial patterns, whatever arise, the future developers of the day will implement the new modules to interact with those new systems. If freelance developers get replaced by automated AI systems, then hire those instead, etc. Ideally, nothing would change too radically in between generations.

The system should aim to have a growing number of descendants, all investing their funds in whatever the most stable opportunities of the day are. The reason to try to have a growing number of descendants is that some will die by bad or fraudulent reproduction. Others might lose all of their money due to unlucky investment outcomes. Still others might get disabled or shut down. However, so long as the system maintains a positive expected survival rate, and it reproduces, I think the population of systems will increase.

There are companies that are researching the use of encoding information in DNA strands, as it holds both lots of information, and degrades relatively slowly over time...

Yes, "rent" a "lifetime VPS" at zap hosting, they only do so for gaming servers so rent a Minecraft one (make sure it's Spigot) and put on this plugin. https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/web-bridge.39843/ Now restart the server, throw the website files in the plugin and restart it again. Easy.

All of the internet hasn't been up for even 50 years, it's definitely interesting to consider. I think the likeliest way would be to leave an investment fund with % widthraw rate that would allow paying a developer every few years for some maintenance or needed migrations as well as enough to pay for the administration of all of this.

Otherwise you depend on friends or family to continue to do that for free across a few generations, which is a lot to trust.

Unequivocally you can consider writing in Arabic. It is almost guaranteed that people will still be able to read Arabic. This is how the build up of the Arabic language heritage continues todate. All is still readable.

Consider this article https://noor.imx.sh/2015/12/22/arabic-beyond-the-numerals-sy...

What is a website?

It represents a CONTINUOUS will to keep something online.

Within the course of a year there could be 5 changes that destroy your website.

Then, the only way to keep a website alive, is to keep YOURSELF alive for 500 years, or to pass on your web development instincts and will to maintain this website on to your future generations.

After 100 years unless you provided some serious forms of feedback into this system they will grow bored of it or your progeny will be too nerdy to continue the line.

Just host your website as plain markdown or HTML on GitHub. They will be around for a long time and if not, the internet archive will still have a copy of your site.

My bet is that you only chance is making it a family history site. And by that I mean that each generation of your future family must contribute their story and at the same time update the site to a modern solution.

The base layer could be text files and image, even though jpeg might not exists in 200 year some other format does.

But you must leave it up to you grandchildren to update the solution to modern formats. Maybe set some inheritance up to support this.

Are they going to have the technology to access the web site? We are about to lose access to many recordings because either we don't have the readers (physical media) or we lost the software to run the codecs and maybe the hardware to run them.

Anyway, make many copies, leave money to run the site, maybe link the availability of the site to the validity of the goods you're passing to your heirs.

And print something, maybe engrave it on stone :-)

Create a virulent sect whose main tenet is to keep the religious scripture (your personal writings) available to as many people as possible.

If you do it right the organisation will self-adjust, recruit new members, gather a tithe from them and keep propagating your writings for thousands of years or more.

There were these folks living in what we now call the middle-east ~3k years ago. Their memetic footprint is still reverberating strong to this day.

It's not 500 years, but you can lock objects in AWS S3 for up to 100 years, depends if you're satisfied AWS will still be a thing in a century.

For a truly lasting legacy, I vote for vinyl. Plastic lasts forever, and the format is easy to reverse-engineer.

My grandpa had an old record player that included a "16 2/3 rpm" speed setting (33 1/3 divided by 2) which was apparently used for 2-hour spoken word performances (think audiobooks, comedy shows...)

Any recent format for storing video, audio, and even text is lkely to be undecipherable in a matter of decades.

Turn the website into historical curiosity.

For example:

Encode the text in QR codes. Use laser to etch the QR codes into thin and light metal plates. Wait until access to space becomes cheaper, then pay $ so that someone places those plates on the surface of the Moon.

Every 30, 50, 100 years some space tourist discovers those plates, reads them and posts them into internet as a curiosity. Their content is probably in Wikipedia, Wikimedia and web archives too.

Genetically engineer an organism and use its DNA to store the information. Encode an easy way to propagate itself to ensure it doesn't dissappear.

probably write it as a virus that jumps from webserver to webserver, doing nothing malicious but adding your HTML to a pre-determined route

it will have to be a strong AI virus so it can keep rewriting itself as new software updates come along so you’re risking a skynet situation - oh! reminds me of the cowboy bebop episode where a hacked satellite entertains itself by drawing geoglyphs in the desert-definitely do that.

Maybe the best bet is a hardened virtual machine. No one knows what the future holds centuries forward, but if humanity survives, I'm sure they will know how to emulate ancient hardware, or convert it to other type of containment.

Half a millennium is eons in computing, it has to have stewardship of some sort if it's going to last that long. AIs could become capable of this task in the near future, who knows?

QR codes on to analogue film seems to be the way they're doing it at the Norway seed bank, along with instructions to decode them. [0]

I'd be (posthumously) surprised if HTML was still a thing in even 100 years.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/norway-gets-a-second-doomsday-vault-that...

Hijacking this question with a related one:

How long could a website realistically stay up for?

How long before the certificate will need to be updated? How about the underlying software? Communication protocol? IP? Each of these have their own probable expiration dates.

Is the URL "https://www.google.com" going to be accessible in 100 years without changing address?

DNA data storage for only data preservation maybe works, but if you want to actively broadcast your content; you can put a compact satellite in geosynchronous orbit with some of the rideshare missions. With redundant avionics and little overkill solar power (or proper RTG if you can afford) it would broadcast your data very long time. But which communication protocol to chose is still mystery.

Maybe decentralized web can survive that long. I just got my first domain on IPFS: ipfs://digitalrose.crypto

I got it on https://unstoppabledomains.com which claims I don't ever have to pay another fee again for it to stay alive forever.

you would need to install plugin or use browser that supports IPFS out of the box: Brave and Opera

Make a front payment for 10 of the oldest businesses each to store a copy of your website for 500 years. They have been around more than a thousand years, likely at least some of them will be around for 500 more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

This question always reminds me of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project - preserving the Domesday Book digitally by way of a laserdisc. The technology used became obsolete almost immediately and the actual book, now 935 years old is still fine.

Deeply chisel it onto a large stone.

Honestly. Very few other things have concrete evidence that they physically last 500 years under real-world conditions, and specific technologies rarely seem to survive even 50 without such drastic changes that they're hardly equivalent any more. And large stones are so common that it's unlikely to be desirable to use it as a resource in the future.

I get my personal sites scraped and saved by the British Library's UK Web Archive[1]. There's no guarantee that my poems will still be viewable in the year 2521, but they're my best bet for immortality.

[1] - https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/uk-web-archive#

In a cave on the far side of the moon. Or, encode the information to be preserved in the DNA of various types of creatures on earth who between them various different number of individuals, lifespan (some very short, some very long) ubiquity across the planet, vulnerability to ecological change. Cockroaches, long living trees, plankton, mosquitoes and dare I say it, humans.

Create multiple copies:

1. Website that can be archived 2. Paper Prints stored in vault 3. Inscribe in stone annually 4. Send data package inscribed in stone to the moon, Mars and Haley’s comet for multiple backups. 5. Figure out a way to send a signal containing the data to space that bounces back every 100 years or so. 6. Become an important figure so humans want to archive your creations.

Ask Piql to archive it, they are the company behind the Arctic World Archive.

If the website must be available on the internet than you are mistaken, the planet is becoming inhabitable and fast. This is a scientific fact. A civilization as unsustainable as ours don't get to be around for 500 years. The next one however should learn from our mistakes, so archiving is a worthwhile effort.

Perhaps look at it another way: each of your actions and thoughts influences people today, who influence people tomorrow, and so on — your legacy lives on within the state space of humanity (same as you are a vessel for the legacy of those before you).

We live in a chaotic system — each action echos through the rest of time (and quite possibly is a deterministic echo of the past).

Write something extraordinary. Don't worry about the frame, what's your content? Write something so god-damn extraordinary people want to preserve it indefinitely, and will do the hard work for you. You've gotta write something absolutely biblical, fundamentally groundbreaking, revolutionary to the hearts and souls of all humanity.

Good luck!

There is a non-technology solution. Start a religion and declare your blog a sacred text. As long as you have followers, the text will be kept safe and translated into whatever communication mediums or languages are available in the future. Of course, making sure the religion sticks around is a bit of a "rest of the owl" exercise.

I have also wondered about this a lot. If you think at a parallel - what are the websites around today that I can imagine also surviving 500 years? - the best I can come up with would be to host on an open platform with a well-established indexer; so ultimately hosting on GitHub Pages with regular caching by Archive.org's Wayback Machine

3d Print the website in stone. Ie by water cutting, laser etching or sintering. Dig said stone under ground for future archegolist to dig up. Alternative put stone in a place it wont get disturbed/destroyed.

Why? Reading text printed in stone last long and has worked numerous times in past history. Examples Roman engravings, viking stones etc.

Flint stone tech

You could publish the site on IPFS. Then you could device a solidity contract that awards ETH to someone hosting / pinning it. There are multiple ways to organise the latter. The easiest could be to provide your heirs the means to change the hosting provider reward address of that contract, in case he discontinues to deliver.

The Longnow foundation (https://longnow.org) and their Rosetta Project (https://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/) may be of some help.

Interestingly, https://www.example.com might still be here in 500 years. It's part of the spec, and the web probably isn't going anywhere.

I guess that isn't a direct answer to "How can we host a website?" but it's at least n=1.

Launch an (autonomous?) ROV to the moon. Draw your message into the sand using the tracks of the ROV. Make the message large enough to be seen from Earth with a high powered telescope. Consider using pictograms, so language won't be an issue.

Bonus points: Pay for the mission by agreeing to embed messages from advertisers as well.

Arweave is something that is being used in the Blockchain space for permanent storage. I believe the upfront cost you pay initially covers storage for the first 200 years. https://arwiki.wiki/#/en/main

1. create a trust with a very reputable law firm, that lays out the terms of the service level agreement for the website.

2. Fund the trust in perpetuity with a large enough amount so that the interest is safely more than the cost to run it, including the trust admin fees.

My out-of-the-ass ballpark, you could probably do it for less than $100k.

500? Make it past the heat death of the universe to send a signal to the god (or /dev/null if you prefer). Joking aside, why would you want this? As soon as your conscience is gone, it won't matter to you anyway. Which is, "perspectively" speaking, the only thing which matters.

Don’t! Write it down on archival paper and present it in an interesting way. The web won’t exist in its current form in 50 years.

As far as I know, my great grandfather’s representation on earth today beyond descendants is a portion of a journal with some writing and a couple of drawings.

For most of us, that’s the best you can hope for.

It doesn't really matter too much how you store it, as what it is: make something people want to remember and they'll figure out how to preserve it. If it's not worth holding onto, eventually someone's going to determine that it's no longer worth keeping.

Application backed by services, or, static content?

If it can be captured and replayed by the Wayback Machine, submit the URL to https://web.archive.org/save/

That's a good side-bet regardless of any personal efforts.

Since there are many variations of "then don't use a website!" Answers here, I'll restate the puzzle.

Say you had to host the information as a set of static HTML documents and you wanted them to remain accessible for as long as possible; what strategy would give you the best odds?

Make it worth preserving to others - ie. make it copy-worthy.

"Lots of copies keeps stuff safe".

https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/lots-of-copies-keep-...

Fantastic question. If our technology we have now is not able to guarantee that whatever is published today is available in 500 years, we must draw the conclusion that it is inferior of what we had 500 years ago that allowed writers to be read 500 years after their deaths.

As others have said -- if the goal is to communicate with your descendants 500 years from now, I wouldn't use the web!

And I wouldn't use CD-ROMs or Bitcoin

I would use something that's proven to last 500 years, which is basically "paper". This is just "the Lindy effect"

This isn’t a technological answer, but set up a trust fund for the purpose. None of us know what web hosting or its equivalent will be in 109 years, let alone 500, so the only real solution is to ensure there will be somebody around whose job will be to sort that out.

I believe this is one of the feature projects like Dfinity/ICP [1] are trying to achieve.

Probably overkill and way early on, but the idea of a decentralized Internet would be key here.

1: https://dfinity.org/

I think this type of question is what make people go and work for the kind of Mark Zuckerbuerg.

Network Solutions has 100 year renewal https://www.networksolutions.com/domain-name-registration/po...

The best example I know of so far about a website outliving its author is cycling resource sheldonbrown.com - inline with what so far has been said here, it just needs to be an astounding enough resource for generation after to take over and maintain.

Write a somewhat influential book and let others figure out how to 'host' this.

Make a lot of dollars and pay a handsome salary conditional entirely on the website fulfilling an availability SLA, and then some company will ensure this vapid task for you manually. There is certainly no way to automate this today.

What can you do that will give someone living 500 years from now a reason to care about your existence? If there is a reason they will find a way. If there is none even a website that may still survive will hardly have any visitors.

The only reliable backup mechanism is starting a successful cult whose main tenet is that your data is valuable communication from God, so that they continually duplicate it. Anything else will go bust in a hundred years at most.

Encode the personal page into a best-selling novel that becomes a classic across the world. The rest of civilization will deal with the redundant storage for you.

If it's small enough, encode it into a catchy children's song or rhyme.

Start a diversified annuity that funds webmasters by contract to perform standard update/migration/backup/payment tasks. Give the annuity to a college, bank, or family to own/manage it based on your bylaws.

Run it on a DLT or blockchain. The project ArGoapp (argoapp.net) opens an easy way to for both developers as laymen to host their website or any application on Web3.0 after paying only once, using projects like Arweave.

Love this question! Books are obviously gret. The Bitcoin blockchain looks promising as well. This is a great problem, looking forward to reading the comments. There must be some projects which tries to solve this.

Only 500 years or better through the dark age of the Galactic Empire?

The Seldon Plan:

1. Start a foundation.

2. Locate it at the outer rimes of the civilised galaxy.

3. Implement a technocratic cult governed by a dynasty of priests.

4. Engage in psychohistorical research for envisioning future risks.

Paper. It is almost certain that the web will not exist in anything near its current form for another 50 years, let alone 500 years.

Even on paper, people may not be able to read the written words due to the drift of languages.

Write something profound enough, and people will keep it around for 500 years to come. They'll keep posting it, reprinting it, rehosting it, archiving it, and sometimes even memorizing it by heart.

If you are using plain HTML and no database or dynamic features and there is not much content ( I am thinking a landing page / portfolio) maybe just engraved it on something in a book form factor

A more useful (and perhaps interesting) question would be "Best way to host a website for 50 years?"

Even that long is quite ambitious as a goal but at least the suggestions might be somewhat actionable.

A QR code encoding an image of the page with some simple compression algorithm.

A second page with the QR code parser and decompression code shown as LISP code.

Perhaps also a LISP interpreter written in LISP to show how it works.

Best way to host a website for 500 years? Solution: Host a website and all the software in a future-proof virtual machine.

Alan Kay describes this is methode in [1] a Starship Conference talk about communication with aliens and in [2]the Cuniform paper.

The virtual machine solution is a solution to more general problems: how to use any software on any type of computing device at any time (even after most hardware and software knowledge has disappeared) and when even creator and user of software not share a language (as with intelligent aliens). They allow software to run bit-identical on any other software or hardware.

Smalltalk virtual machines are still running software sinds 1972(!) [4] and have been ported to the most diverse hardware and operating systems of any software I know of, even in javascript web browsers [3].

My websites are an existence proof. In 1987 I founded the first internet provider (as far as I know) and built some of the first websites in 1993. These websites have now been online for 28 years (actually longer but not in HTML format but Hypercard).

All my websites are written in Smalltalk (a programming language and operating system in a virtual machine image) and since 2007 in the Seaside continuation framework inside Squeak. All that I need to do is have a small simple virtual machine program running and responding to TCP/IP packets. The virtual machine executes whatever is in the image file, in this case a Squeak Smalltalk image and several Seaside websites).

Jecel Mattos de Assumpçao Jr. and Merik Voswinkel have been inventing and producing manycore microprocessors to execute most (universal) virtual machines like Smalltalk or QEMU under the brand names Morphle and SiliconSqueak since 2007. Contact us at morphle at ziggo dot nl for more info about our universal parallel reconfigurable software defined virtual machine microprocessors.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wW89RHf4D4

[2] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2015004_cuneiform.pdf

[3] https://computerhistory.org/blog/introducing-the-smalltalk-z...

[4] https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/

Just put it on myspace. That information will never completely go away.

Encode it into your DNA and make sure to spread your seed far and wide.

If we haven't destroyed ourselves until then, you should be able to go to your local DNA reading store and view the contents.

The chances of your webpage being visible in 500 years is about nil. The browsers won't talk to it because it is not using the latest TLS. Your certificate will have long expired. Google will have removed you from your index because they disagree with your arcane viewpoints. Your host probably went bankrupt or decided not to support whatever setup is hosting your page. Somebody will have to translate it to Chinese when they take over. And so on. You probably have better chances printing it out on high quality paper. Good news is that you'll be in good company - Amazon will get disrupted, Facebook will fizzle, IBM will go back to making cheese slicers, and so on.

Publish it as a book and send two copies to the Library if Congress.

Claim the webpage was revealed to you in a vision from God, and tell folks they’ll go to heaven if they study it. Seemed to work for Mohammed, Moses, Joseph Smith, and many others.

I love the hubris of this. It's going to have to be something profound to have anyone, including your progeny, care about it in 50, let alone 500 years after you are gone.

I remember seeing an HN article about a stone disc that could keep your data intact for 1000 years.

I can't seem to find it. All that comes up in search is something called M-Disc

Create some sort of religion around your website. The modern big religions seem to have done a decent job keeping their fixtures around for the last 2000-3000 years.

If I wanted something I wrote to last as long as possible. I would learn how to make diamond and etch it into that.

I don't know if that is even possible. But that is my plan.

dumb thought: I was thinking if it is possible to beam info into space/somehow have the backdrop return it. Doesn't make sense, you'd need to know the formula/changes with space as it expands but yeah.

I'm not literally talking about radio waves or something. I mean to use space as a medium to write on but "how". As in you send light to specific things that would return it and account for shift/losses over time.

The concept behind Arweave is to provide at least 200 years of permanent storage.

https://www.arweave.org

IPFS might be an option. God knows if it'll be around in 500 years, but it seems like a promising solution, and it's designed to get around link rot.

Arweave! Its a 200 year storage endowment https://www.arweave.org/

A small sat in the Lagrange point between moon and earth should do. The sat would host a server, communicate over radio waves and get energy from the sun.

Reminds me of GKH getting a request from the japanese transport ministry (I think?) for a distro release that is supported for 20 years

Even 20 is forever never mind 500

Maybe a self-evolving computer virus, that continually propagates itself to new systems, with its only function to serve some personal web pages?

permanent.org has a model for blob storage that I really like and think could equally be applied to web hosting: instead of paying monthly for the service you pay a bit more up front just one time and this is put into a nonprofit endowment which is used to fund the storage costs. It may not last for 500 years, but it seems more likely to last quite a bit longer than your basic web host.

Don't count on websites, count on real things. I know books, buildings, places, art, monuments, ornaments have all lasted hundreds of years

The question is really not _how_ to maintain it, but _why_.

If you've said something valuable, then the means of preserving it will take care of themselves.

Print it, laminate it, seal it in water tight container.

There is no permanence on the web, everything thats there takes constant maintenance to keep in place.

Compress to zip file. Get raw code, upload to major blockchains.

Upload static site to archive.is

Put thumb drive in time capsule in hidden location , also printed source code

1. Put it on github static pages and hope for the best.

2. Create a bot that searches the internet for free hosting, and automate account creation and mirror the content.

3. Print 100 copies on different manufacturers archive quality paper, use a vacuum pump and seal the books separately. Shield them from light. Put money in trust for a trustee to find something like fiver to rebuild the site every 20 years with one of your archive backups. Include multi language dictionaries in your archive storage for the eventually that your language is dead.

You could try and increase the chances you're alive in 500 years, by donating to efforts such as the SENS Foundation.

Then you can keep it up yourself.

We definitely won't have websites in 500 years

Why? Why would someone be willing to host your web page after you are dead?

Two reasons come to mind: Either they like it a lot or they get paid to do it.

Work from there.

Write an epic on energy and or climate change. How people behaved, politics, etc. Link to all oil companies research, etc.

This topic will persevere.

I'd recommend checking out zen meditation as a moderately effective approach to confronting the terror of death and oblivion .

Isn't the correct answer to put something other people deem worth saving in the website? Then they will preserve it for you

Etch it into a stone tablet and throw it into a cave somewhere, point a webcam at it. As webcams evolve, switch out the webcam.

Create a charitable trust whose sole purpose is to keep up your website.

Then fund an annuity and have the proceeds funds the charitable trust.

Any system that outlives the author has intrinsic value that others recognize. So make a page that others want to keep alive.

Blockchain: IPFS and FIL

Though, who knows what will be around in 500 years. In theory, some blockchains will be, if only as museum pieces.

1. Build a cult, something like the bible and distribute it open source.

2. Store your static website on arweave.org for a one time fee.

No need to worry.

Eventually the future species / AI will find a way to recreate the entire past history and see everything we did.

You probably need to tightly define "host" and "website". The answer will likely fall out of that.

1) Invent a new format

2) Create a wikipedia page about it

3) Add a sample example for your format (and the actual content)

4) Done, Wikipedia will be preserved for 500y+

print pictures on archival grade paper with archival grade inks and store them in a controlled environment.

Inscribe the website into a tablet made from non reactive materials and again store in a controlled environment.

Launch a satellite into space in stable orbit and have them retrieve the pictures/tablet from the satellite in 500 years.

Found a religion around it and make the website its sacred scripture. You may be surprised how long it will live.

This is such a good interview question lol

You can store your message in pi but you would need to remember where to look. (not my idea but took from pi fs)

There are books that have been around for 500+ years. They’re probably more durable than websites at this point.

Everything succumbs to entropic loss. May as well accept the fact and let things die with you the natural way.

I pay permanent.org for this. God knows if they’ll even be up in 30 years, but I appreciate the sentiment.

I would change it into sculpture on some precious metal... And put some dust on top it with a shiny sign

https://posthaven.com/

I'm surprised no one is saying this: Write a worm/virus that continues to propagate the data.

Does anyone have an update of the "Digital Vellum" Vint Cerf was working on.

I think it could be relevant here.

Series of stone tablets + a visual grammar, language that can be deciphered from scrach with new eyes.

this is actually one of the few usecases for which a globally distributed blockchain makes sense.

maybe host an html file on an ethereum smart contract with a very, very large trustfund that people can donate to?

i'd guess the ethereum blockchain will survive 500 years. Or a subsequent fork of it will.

How about "Have it engraved into your tombstone and pay for a perpetual-care gravesite".

Store the content on the bitcoin blockchain. Expensive but it'll be available for 500+ years

Ask the church of scientology they have this technology down at least for information retention.

Is your next idea is Of starting organisation with core goal is of preservation of such text ?

Become (in)famous enough and I'm sure historians would host your website in perpetuity.

Blockchains are meant to be eternal. Check out Arweave arweave.org. Might fit your use case.

Print to PDF, store on archival quality CDs and/or print to archival quality paper.

Make it as small as possible and encode it as an ethereum nft! If u want I can help u…

Encode it in the DNA of a few million tardigrades. Spread them all over the planet.

Become really famous (or infamous) so you don't have to host anything. Others will do it for you. Think about all the people you know who existed 500+ years ago. Did we just happen to find a book/stone where they wrote their story ? It was more about what they did that created history. So, create history and you will be hosted for ever. Think of names like Julius Caeser etc.

I think I saw some sort of upsell on GoDaddy for 500 year hosting the other day.

Build pyramids low tech giant physical structures that survive the test of time

Create a mechanical type set reader device that is “powered” by a clock spring.

Transmit it into space, maybe some distant alien civilization will receive it.

Start a religion. Make it popular. See how the Bible is performing until now.

By that time, every website on the planet has been rewritten as a native app.

Crave it in stone in a place without much erosion. Worked for the Persians.

Set up a trust fund that pays someone to keep it available as times change

Make an oil painting of it.

Is there anything current day that is potentially stable for 500 years ?

Convince the world to abandon HTTPS because no cert will last that long.

Your best best is github.io hosted website and archive.org for content.

It is unlikely any web browser survive to parse this kind of web page.

put your page on a decentralized platform like Ethereum or IPFS and hope it gets maintained for 500 years. With Ethereum at least, there is a monetary incentive to keep the platform alive.

Publish it in a major research journal. PRL is a pretty good choice.

Assuming the human race will actually survive the next 500 years...

Take steel and write it on steel tablets, and plan well in advance.

Blockchain, just like how I'll pass on my money for 500 years

The answers are very interesting! You all are Cathedral Thinkers.

Is this an attempt to have neon colored geocities page forever ?

It is unlikely that humanity will exist for more than 500 years.

At this point, your best bet would be to put it on archive.org.

Etch it into metal or stone blocks and seal it in a mausoleum.

Don't worry about it, you'll be long dead by then.

Encode it in the bitcoin unspent transaction output set.

Great question and great answers! Interesting topic.

Endow a university to start an archival server project.

Create a perpetual trust. This is legal in some states.

crave it on a stone, tested and proven by our ancestors

AWS S3 static page, and a well-funded savings account.

you could host 100% on blockchain.

host the domain on unstoppable domains (https://unstoppabledomains.com/)

store the images and single page site on IPFS https://ipfs.io/

https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/websites-on-ipfs/single-page-web...

Do something very bad.

Or very, very, very good.

You might be remembered for that.

Please don't, nothing should last forever.

blockchain, ipfs, it needs to live inside something else that other people care about enough to maintain and keep alive

create the website as purely static, then print it out and stick it in a book or on a metal cd (like the voyager project did)

do something broadly and historically relevant. assuming humanity survives that long, it will preserve your output.

surely the correct answer is to put something worth saving in the website. Then people will save it for you.

Personal page? Encode it on blockchain.

There will be no websites in 500 years.

Take a look at https://siasky.net

It's a blockchain (Sia) and they focus on data storing.

inscribe it on a marble and bury it.

Get it into the trunk of linux git

Post it in a Hacker News comment.

Take a look at IPFS or Arweave.

Have it crawled by web archive

not possible with the way things are currently being run.

go bury a time capsule instead.

AMPRNet on 44.0.0.0/8

Yep, well-preserved vellum

Ask Elon to tweet about it

Host it on geocities :-)

Hollerith Punch Cards.

Set the clock ahead.

there will be no computers or internet in 500 years

chisel it into stone and protect it from erosion

probably as a static page hosted on arweave

create a wikipedia page for yourself... ?

Stupid question

NES cartridge

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages

Try Github.

AWS S3

IPFS

Geocities

Paper.

arweave

Looking at the past 100 years of change, progress, and war, what do you think the odds are there will be anyone left to view your website in 500 years? Or that the web will be anything like it is today? Or that English will even be in use then?

Set it in concrete. Most of the films from the 20's burned up and the software track record is terrible.