Steal the Internet - Archiving Everything and Sharing It With Others

Steal the Internet

How to archive absolutely Everything and share it

Follow along at<br>https://aramzs.me/stealit

Hi! 👋 I'm<br>Aram Zucker-Scharff<br>(@chronotope.aramzs.xyz)

Every time you visit a website, it downloads itself to your<br>computer...

You should get to keep it.

Websites die, get taken offline, or get removed to hide the truth.

*From:<br>https://slate.com/business/2024/02/messenger-gawker-vice-media-layoffs-sites-deleted-why.html

Between 2013 and 2024 66.5% of the links on the web went dead.

66.5%

*From:<br>https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-rot-study/

2014: 70% of the links within legal journals and 50% of the URLs from<br>Supreme Court decisions did not contain the originally cited material.

2012: 30% of social media links were dead within two years.

*From:<br>https://ahrefs.com/blog/link-rot-study/

The Trump administration has been deleting things off the web left and<br>right.

*From:<br>https://apnews.com/article/cdc-census-federal-data-trump-6a9ba7c01a42b72e2c0a119325ba3753

Trump administration’s data deletions set off ‘a mad scramble,’<br>researcher says

And no university seems able to keep their own pages online.

*From:<br>https://tucson.com/news/local/education/college/university-arizona-land-acknowledgement-statement-diversity-dei-trump-administration-orders/article_7adb21a8-efc2-11ef-a393-83ebf14a3efd.html

Trump administration’s data deletions set off ‘a mad scramble,’<br>researcher says

What about The Internet Archive?

People can request takedowns from the archive, or block the archive's<br>crawlers

What about The Internet Archive?

And The Internet Archive is in danger...

Help The Internet Archive if you can!

but don't rely on it to be the only solution.

The archive can use your donations

Do not use archive dot is, the service does not persist effectively<br>and isn't trustworthy.

So if you want to make sure a citation or a source is available

Archive it yourself!

*From:<br>https://aramzs.xyz/microblogs/if-the-federal-government-hosts-something-important-to-you-archive-it-yourself/

Browsertrix is a high-powered tool for caching tons of pages at once.

You can share and download the collections you've created.

ArchiveBox is a really useful tool to host your very own web archive<br>site.

You can use ArchiveBox to archive groups of pages, whole sites,<br>sitemaps<br>or<br>RSS feeds. It also makes copies of videos with<br>yt-dlp.

You can also make a copy of the files it creates.

Or use it to<br>create a static website<br>with all your archives.

Web Recorder puts archive tools in your browser

Web Recorder's browser extension will archive pages as you look at<br>them and allow you to replay them locally and export them.

Once you've created an archive you can replay it, share it and store<br>it.

All these services create WARC and WACZ files

Web ARChive files are the main way web site archives are built, stored<br>and made transportable. They can be played back and explored.

You can embed re-playable web page archives in other pages, like your<br>articles.

Here's how.

Learn more about how web archives and WARC files work.

And now you can take archive files like those from Web Recorder...

...and put them on ATProto

with Archiving.at.

Log in with your ATmosphere account to `archiving.at`

And share your archives with everyone!

Archives should be:

portable

sharable

re-playable

able to be taken offline

marked with useful metadata

They are invaluable to hold for reporting on web-based information.

Want to help the archive?

Archive Team is a really cool collective of volunteers who do work on<br>their own to save the history of the internet and if you have a little<br>extra cash, maybe<br>support their efforts!

if you're interested in how, it is all open source, check that out<br>too! You could even participate!

Check out their work!

Worksheet

Archiving.at<br>- Many improvements coming soon

Internet Archive

Web Recorder

ArchiveBox

Browsertrix

A list of web archiving tools

Understanding Memento API and WARC Files

More Resources

Check out this great zine on web archiving techniques and tools.

It has tips on how best to use Web Archiver and Browsertrix and<br>overall best practices.

Here's<br>my blog post that was the beginning of this presentation.

Steal this site at<br>https://aramzs.me/stealit

Make your own copy from its<br>open source code!

Donate to The Internet Archive, if you can.

Steal the Internet<br>by<br>Aram Zucker-Scharff<br>is licensed under<br>CC BY 4.0