I like the theory of the IA enough that I have a reoccurring donation, but I've thought a few times about e-mailing them to cancel (they have to halt your monthly donation charges manually). There's plenty of issues I can overlook, like having to compete with scrapers to get a single page to load, or a myriad of longstanding technical issues (my favorite being that the collection upload system silently and irrevocably leaks your e-mail address: https://archive.org/post/240444/help-to-hide-email (2009)). What I can't overlook is that the IA brazenly hosts warez on clearnet and pulls off stunts like the COVID "emergency library".
I'm all for ending copyright, but does any of that really need to be linked with the Wayback Machine? Huge chunks of the Web have been displaced or snuffed by social media and gen AI, making Wayback a uniquely valuable resource. It's strange to risk it as a motte for the bailey of copyright abolition activism.
THere's also archive.today who does great user-directed archiving. We don't appreciate this infrastructure some random guy runs enough.
It's annoying how often archive.org blocks sites but they both complement each other very well.
https://liberapay.com/archiveis/donate
When finding archive.today's Monero donation address just now, I had to use archive.org because donatemonero.org [1] is down.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260526080016/https://donatemon...
Um. You mean the same site that uses its captcha page to DDOS sites the owner doesn't agree with, and was banned from use on Wikipedia because the owner was modifying the archived pages?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...
I don't think we should be supporting this random guy, no.
And archive.org removes perfectly legal content from their accessible archives. Nobody's perfect. The guy running archive.today has done a shit ton of good.
Well then another guy should provide a technically equivalent and morally superior service ;)
I mean, lots of other archive.* sites exist and do the same thing minus problematic behavior, such as archive.is, archive.oh (though maybe some are operated by the same individual...)
Are any of those not run by the archive.today guy? That site has like a dozen aliases.
Absolutely deserves a donation too. How it keeps running is beyond me, especially as he/she/they keep adding more paywall bypasses on the backend.
It was super easy to donate; Im so glad they have a landing page that supports several payment methods and makes it easy to donate. I love the wayback machine, hope everyone pitches in : ).
I do like the Internet Archive but I wish I could retrieve large segments from it myself. It has very aggressive 429s. It would be a nice higher donor tier feature. Maybe it’s not possible to do so and retain 501c3 status? Regardless I have had to start performing personal datahoarding. C’est la vie.
They posted on X about supporting this when someone was spamming them with requests
I wonder if they could sell you access to a bittorrent tracker? Officially it would be independent of the donations, just an extra service they sell?
They have torrent downloads for a lot of content, I've downloaded almost a terabyte from them via torrent, they're just not bundled, as in you would need to retrieve each torrent file for each item individually, which might still get you a 429 if you automated it idk.
I've never actually got a 429 using a browser though personally, they do throttle aggressively though
Just posting this so others can be reminded to donate the archive (no association by me, just a fan).
Who's paying?
I click through to a few links and cannot find who is doing the matching
That’s what I want to know before committing too.
Let's be honest, almost nobody is donating a significant amount i.e. $100K+ to the Internet Archive that would actually keep them alive.
Everyone wants to scrape and extract from them 100% for free.
Just donated. Appreciate the reminder.
How do they handle AI slop? If they index AI generated articles, it is just not sustainable, right?
Yeah, _no_
Shut ClimateGPT down, apologize and then we can talk about donation.
That is Internet Archive Europe, which is independent from Internet Archive
Interesting. How is ClimateGPT linked to archive.org, and why do you object to it?
They're probably reacting to this
https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11721950124572...
ClimateGPT is built by Erasmus.AI, which says "Built by Erasmus.AI on behalf of the ClimateGPT Foundation, and supported by the Internet Archive Europe,".
Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive founder (and board chair), is on the board of Erasmus.AI.
It does seem weird to rattle the donation box because hosting costs are going up while shooting money at the prime cause of hosting costs going up.
They are independent organizations with separate funding.
then why did the main IA account post about this https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/11721950124572...
and it's darkly funny how HN downvotes this when every single answer on Mastodon is incredibly negative
Brewster Kahle is on IA Europe's board as well (with Daniel Erasmus, whose baby is Erasmus.AI).
I'm sure they have separate bank accounts, but let's not pretend these organizations are independent. They're all run by the same little club of friends.
What should archive.org apologise for in this regard?