Somebody has to do the hosting. Even if it s a federated platform, somebody has to care, federation just mixes up the content a bit. We should be demanding for public archives of people's information.
The problem is that aggregators dont make money from the hosting of the content but by indexing it/mixing it/recommending it. So they have no real incentive to store the content (but they do want the metadata). I think the solution is that we should all have publicly-provided storage space in the form of a free blog or email. Something very simple, could be just text/pics, that is at guaranteed not to be shutdown and is actually protected by free speech laws. Someone has to build the roads
Nobody has cloned and re-hosted (yet?). It requires significant tech knowledge at this point. Plus I'm only 2 out of 4 on the list of things to make that possible.
That said, there are quite a few people in the JK community that are trying to "archive the jk universe" and they have crawled and saved the site and the forums and they do make their copies publicly available.
At first my instinct was "they copied my entire site, that's not right." But (so far) their goal is to copy/archive every JK site and I'm glad they are doing it because tons of old sites have just dropped off the face of the internet. Including the site that originally hosted the Jed (JK) editor and a bunch of other tools, many of which had the involvement of at least one of the original developers of the game. It's just cool stuff and it sucks that it gets lost.
Somebody has to do the hosting. Even if it s a federated platform, somebody has to care, federation just mixes up the content a bit. We should be demanding for public archives of people's information.
The problem is that aggregators dont make money from the hosting of the content but by indexing it/mixing it/recommending it. So they have no real incentive to store the content (but they do want the metadata). I think the solution is that we should all have publicly-provided storage space in the form of a free blog or email. Something very simple, could be just text/pics, that is at guaranteed not to be shutdown and is actually protected by free speech laws. Someone has to build the roads