Wayback Machine lets you select snapshots in a calendar without thumbnails, which is better for navigating among a large number of snapshots, while Archive.today shows a chronological dump of thumbnails, which is better for noticing visible changes.

Archive.today is better at getting through paywalls, the Wayback Machine doesn’t really do this.

And while not a functional difference, but imho quite important: The Wayback Machine is ran by a 100+ employee non-profit registered in the USA, which lends it quite a bit of legal and financial stability, but also subjects it to official oversight/censorship, while Archive.today is ran by a single mysterious dude who carefully hides his identity, and we don’t know where the most of the site’s finances come from. (Edit: In one of the posts copied below he mentioned that he has some donations and ad revenue, but as of 2021 this covered less than 1/3 of the running costs.)

Both financial security and resistance to censorship can be useful attributes to an online archive, but I have more trust in the Wayback Machine being online in 10 or 20 years, than Archive.today.

Edit The archive.today owner has a few blog posts mentioning these kind of things:

July 27, 2021:

anonymous:
Not respecting people’s privacy, copyright laws, or the veracity of content on your website… Please tell us more about how this archive isn’t being well managed and is doomed to die at any moment!

archive-is:
Of course, it is doomed to die at any moment (you should not have any illusions, as well as about the “veracity of content” on the Internet). The only idea is to hold back a little something that is doomed to die a little earlier. I hope that it is obvious after all the deplatforming dramas of the last months (disappearance of @realDonaldTrump, etc)

August 13, 2021:

anonymous:
You said that before you die of old age you would implement a download zip of your whole site. That’s fine but links to archived pages will still be broken if you die if you don’t have someone to follow in your footsteps to maintain the site because the site will go offline or somebody will buy your expired domain name using it for another purpose. Do you have plans for someone to take over your site? I have thousands of archived pages, don’t want that work to go to waste.

archive-is:
I do not think there are many people willing to maintain such a project, which is also unprofitable. All 4½ projects over there - (IA, Archive.today, Megalodon.jp, half-suspensed WebCite, and paid Pinboard.in) look running on energy and money of a single person each and likely will be greatly changed or shutdown by the heirs.

I could only advise to save everything locally to sync your documents with your own lifespan. Do not rely on clouds.

daveymames:
You don’t need many people mate, just a small amount of people is all that’s required. I for example would be willing to accept a passing of the torch. I would fund it with my own money and allow people to donate. I’m planning a site similar to Archive.org of my own that allows uploading via torrents so you can upload big files which is hard to do on archive.org and it bans people who don’t keep 1TB of stuff permanently seeded. This way I don’t need to waste money on storage.

How much does hosting cost you per month at the moment?

archive-is:
about ~$2600/mo of pure expenses on servers/domains, not counting “work time”, “buying laptop/furniture”, etc. ($100…300/mo covered by donations + $300…500 by ads)

I’d suggest starting with pdf/djvu archive:

• It is of demand: people here often ask about archiving pdf/djvu and are particularly interested in archiving from another website rather than uploading (for some vague legal reasons).

• Unlike archive.is, it is more a blob storage and fit to “store me a terabyte” model: there is no need to develop and support own file formats and its renderers.

• There is a ready-made dataset to rescue and get some press attention on: Sci-Hub.

• The mission is more about “save forever“ than our “keep a page online after the original took down or altered“.

archive-is:
Also, https://docs.softwareheritage.org/ is a storage-heavy initiative which would need extra mirrors and crawlers. I need it as a user, especially immutable weekly snapshots of whole language repositories (such as maven.apache.org, npmjs.com, crates.io, …)

January 28, 2022:

anonymous:
Do you have anything prepared for the fate of the archive in the event of your death?

archive-is:
It is an overly optimistic assumption that there will be no risks before I die. Many projects (including at least two in this area: peeep.us and webcitation.org) stopped working long before the death of the people behind them. Many projects pivoted following the money. In addition, there are many critical points (e.g., domains) that I have no control over.

Mozilla really shot itself in the foot here. A dedicated body of volunteers is invaluable for any project. All that community goodwill and free labour, gone…

Capitalism is at it again 🤦 What are they selling next? Air?

Also what I’ve heard from open-source project maintainers, once a project gets popular, the flood of feature requests is neverending. (Something I’m sure I contributed to over the years 🫣) And especially in cases of feature requests with niche usefulness or mismatching vision, they can sap developer morale.

I’ve been using Ecosia for a few months now and sadly I’m not having the best experience either. For mainstream stuff it gives good results, but once I search for obscure phrases or god forbid another language, it often just completely gives up and doesn’t show a single result. It pains me to say that I more reliably get usable results from Google’s Web search (so with the AI crap removed) than from Ecosia with Google set as its results provider.

I like the way they run around in groups while combing an area for food :) Also they are really pretty from close up, kinda iridescent, with lots of little white spots!

Tbh starlings have an extremely varied repertoire. When I’m passing near a singing one here in Scotland, for the several minutes that I’m in hearing range, it never repeats the same tune. Pretty amazing!

I love Merlin :) It helped me learn to recognise so many local birdsongs!

Yes, I love Merlin too! I got the two apps at the same time earlier this year, but tbh I strongly prefer Floria Incognita’s location system, that it just plops a GPS marker onto its map, instead of forcing me give a unique name to every 100 metres of a path, like Merlin does 😅

Cars are such a central part of modern life

I think that depends a lot on where you live. The vast majority of my colleagues and friends don’t have cars, but we live in large UK cities, so life is easily doable without a car. Even a friend who used to have a car ended up selling it, bc he just didn’t use it enough to justify the costs.

I was a bit like that too, but since I started using Flora Incognita, I’m actually recognising different trees as I’m walking on the street, even without the app 🤯

My partner is like this with birds xD

me: “Oh look, a starling!”

him: “Yep, it’s a bird.”

(though to be fair, he’s getting better at it :P)

Reminds me of that story about Windows’s format dialog. It’s on Xitter, so here’s the text:

Dave W Plummer

I wrote [Windows’s] Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.

We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI.

I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.

Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.

That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in “temporary” solutions!

I also had to decide how much “cluster slack” would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.

So remember… there are no “temporary” checkins :)

this extension seemingly only lists third party DRM.

That could be the case! Unfortunately I can’t see any documentation about it on their website or github repo.

I’m playing with mouse and keyboard, so not sure that’s possible with the Android version.

I saw a Linux Genshin launcher on github a while ago, but iirc it carries some ban risk that I don’t want to expose my account to.

I don’t know of a bulk tool, but the Augmented Steam browser extension shows a DRM warning above the purchase button when you go on a game’s Steam store page.

And many games haven’t been assessed either. I plugged my Steam account into ProtonDB, and apparently 51% of my games can be made to run perfectly on Linux, 10% are various levels of broken, but the remaining 39% has no information. I guess it’s because I have many indie games in my library.

The only thing I want to say is that the “10%” that don’t work are usually pretty popular.

Yeah, like I’m glad Linux support is increasing among games, but my main daily driver game (Genshin) still doesn’t support it 🤷 And I don’t think Hoyoverse will be spending work on Linux support when they are raking in so much cash from their millions of players. From what I can see Linux usage hovers around 0.3% in China, and that’s Hoyo’s main market.

website

this is such a cute idea 🥹 now I imagine them running little Wordpress blogs

cheeky xD