this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
955 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
59379 readers
2596 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ok, serious question. Why is it normally read/write? I’ve always treated it as being read only.
I mean how else would they archive web sites or content?
Web crawling?
IA hosts TONS of user uploaded content. They’re not uploading those Gameboy ROMs themselves.
Live music archive is still down for example 😞
I’ve always thought they were a crawler.
The Wayback machine is a crawler, which is big part of what they do but not everything. The Wayback machine crawls its own pages, but you can also submit URLs to be crawled.
The other part of what they do is hosting a significant number of digital archives of media that is no longer sold / in print / distributed. Much of that content is user uploaded. Like “oh hey I found this old clip art cd from the early 90s. I don’t really have a use for it, but if this doesn’t get uploaded somewhere it’s probably going to be lost to time. I’ll submit it to the internet archives.”
They do some crawling themselves, but Archive Team (a third party group) does a lot of web archiving as well.
My most frequent use case of the IA in general is the Cover Art Archive, and I frequently upload cover art for albums to the CAA via MusicBrainz. That's how I discovered the IA was down, when an upload failed.