| FUTUREPROOFING THE COLLECTION Reminiscing about some old stuff in a /wsr/ thread on the death of /r/, I realized that swfchan is basically the Library of Alexandria for a certain aspect of the old internet. In a way, it's of the caliber of archive.org, but with 0.01% of the prominence. For games we have Flashpoint, so many animations and loops and ancient memes and flv videos and obscure Japanese stuff can only be found on swfchan. People used to say "The Internet is Forever" but that's clearly not true, and we've already lost so much. Now with all the AI stuff floating around we're clearly entering a very bleak era for internet (world) culture. The swfs here deserve to be preserved, for genuine historical interest if nothing else. swfchan has been up for almost 20 years now, and it's headed by a single anonymous Swede. How long will it stay up? What will happen to all the content here? TO SWFCHAN ADMIN: I'd contact you directly via email, but that's apparently not an option (anymore). I kindly ask you to consider futureproofing this collection in some way. I thought maybe by distributing a snapshot of the database in torrent form. My own collection is about 22,000 swf files strong, at 46 GB. That's maybe 10% of the size of swfchan, and I have plenty of diskspace for even several terrabytes if necessary. I think it's reasonable to think other digital hoarders and would-be internet historians would be interested to preserving the contents of this site. There are many similar torrents out there, passing along ancient data and unique cultural artifacts that would have been otherwise lost. The Touhou Loseless Music Collection, the huge 1TB Visual Novel archive, various internet music and newgrounds and freeware game archives, not to mention all the massive shadow libraries out there (e.g. LibGen, Annas Archive). I think Flash deserves the same. |
