HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you make your blog posts last forever after your death?

12 points by saifulwebid ↗ HN
Looks like HN community prefer to self-host their blogs. How do you make sure that your blog posts will still be accessible after your death? My late friend self-hosted his blog, and several months after his death, his blog cannot be accessed anymore as the subscription(s) expired.

16 comments

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methusala8
https://posthaven.com/

Sam Altman uses this.

brudgers
Original discussion of Posthaven, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229229
mbrock
Six years ago the founder said setting up a nonprofit foundation for the thing was a good idea but it doesn't seem to have happened. Their pledge doesn't mention anything about what happens when the current two people get bored of it or otherwise lose the ability to maintain it. I don't see any clear reason to believe the ad copy about "lasting forever."
onion2k
Set up a trust to pay someone to maintain them.
randomvectors
1. You can't make anything last forever. Just a little while longer if you set things up correctly.

2. Is your blog really that important, meaningful or valuable that it needs to be preserved after your death?

3. Apart from technical solutions, writing things that people will read and share is the best way to preserve what you've created.

saifulwebid
1. How about posting it in a hosted solution like wordpress.com? Is it better in this case than self-hosting your blog?

2. No, it is not (yet, maybe). But I’d like my writings to be accessible as long as possible after my death.

frou_dh
Since a blog that won't be posted to any more is effectively read-only data, interested parties could receive a copy of that data to be viewed locally. It doesn't necessarily need to stay on the internet with a domain name.
runjake
Posthaven, Archive.org, or Github Pages.
saifulwebid
Why not something like wordpress.com? I know this disqualifies the “self-host” part, but is it better in this case than self-hosting your blog?
claudiulodro
Obviously it will restrict the post-death reach of your blog, but the most foolproof solution would be to print our your articles and store them somewhere safe.

The average person can read a 100-year old book just fine. Digital storage changes too quickly. The average person can't really access information stored on floppy disks, and those were ~30 years ago.

mbrock
You could mirror your blog posts to a decentralized network like Secure Scuttlebutt, assuming you have a few friends who would be willing and able to follow your feed and thus mirror your content. Or it might be simpler to just email out a copy of each blog post to a little mailing list of people who care about you. Let them know that you'd like your legacy to remain public and they can probably coordinate among themselves to set up a public archive when the time comes.
quickthrower2
You could put them in the Bitcoin blockchain. That’ll last as long as people are greedy, so probably a long time. Whether people will know they are there in the future I don’t know.
randomvectors
Generally speaking, the purpose of something written is to be read. Putting text in the bitcoin blockchain is as good as writing it down on something durable and burying it deep underground. It might last a long time, but it's pretty pointless.
bjourne
It is a very complicated problem. One idea I've thought about is to hide a server in the woods. You should be able to connect it with a pre-paid gsm sim card and for power have a large battery... The server should be hibernating and consuming minimal amount of energy while not serving requests.

A second option is to piggyback on other services, such as github, wikipedia (some allow personal pages in your own namespace) and various message boards. You could even mail your blog posts to Swedish government services as they would be obliged to archive it. People would "access" your blog posts by mailing the same government services and requesting all emails sent by saifulwebid on June 12, 2019 for example. Of course this idea doesn't scale and if enough people tried it they would change the rules.

Usenet posts should last a very long time too. But even those eventually vanishes and posts from the 80's are nowhere to be found.