Add draft doc around Sneakernet

content/posts/sneakernet-archive/index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+---
+title: Sneakernet Archive
+emoji: 👟
+date: 2024-08-22T10:24:41.349Z
+tags:
+  - web
+  - IPFS
+  - archival
+  - design
+summary: I have a vision for sharing and storing community artefacts (eg. photos, stories) that's super easy for people, but also technically excellent for long-term archival.
+topics:
+- Technology
+- Community
+draft: true
+---
+I've been slowly working on, and advocating for, changes to bits of software (including my favourite, [IPFS](/tags/ipfs), the InterPlanetary File System) to make it suitable for communities without (good) internet access to share and keep cultural artefacts in a way that'll last the ages. I realised I've been slowly doing this for _years_ now, but I've never written about it — so it's time to share!
+
+## Why distributed digital archival is important
+
+I adore the internet and the web (I've made a living from it!) but it is a very _alive_ thing — constantly changing and augmenting what it is, how its constituent parts are operated, and how they interconnect. Like all living things, one day it will die. I don't see that as happening _soon_, but without a significant global shift in how we fund species-wide infrastructure it'll likely be something less freely available and open. This poses a problem for cultural artefacts.
+
+Where sons would write letters to fathers announcing something culturally significant in a way that's [still legible hundreds of years later](https://lettersofnote.com/2023/03/10/mr-watson-come-here-i-want-to-see-you/); today entire archives of cultural artefacts can be [deleted without notice after only 40 years](https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2024/06/26/mtv-news-archives-deleted/74225789007/) to save corporate money. One day Google Photos will join the [graveyard](https://killedbygoogle.com/) of its services that are no longer profitable, and your cultural archives will be lost to the void (assuming you set up [inactive account manager](https://myaccount.google.com/inactive), and your digital estate was an interesting enough legacy to keep!)
+
+Separately, while the internet is ubiquitous in my (and I presume your) world, [only ~63% of the global population uses the internet](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-individuals-using-the-internet), but at least [15% more have access to a computer](https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/access-to-computers-from-home.html) and likely almost all of these expect that their data, and data they rely on, will _just always be there_.
+
+Combine with this that _physical storage_ isn't much better: the dye on burnt CDs can fade after just 5 years, USB drives & SD cards can see "bit-rot" after 10 years, HDDs will likely have half-demagnetised after ~70 years.
+
+To counteract all of this decay — to keep cultural artefacts _alive_ — they need to be always available, copied (even to new  storage technologies) regularly (and with error correction) and, above all, be _used_ and _available_.
+
+## What I'm doing & planning
+