====== The Long Web ======

The Long Web is the practice of building websites and services meant to last for decades. The term comes from a session at [[https://indieweb.org/2016/Longweb|IndieWeb Summit 2016]] and is related to the IndieWeb principle of [[https://indieweb.org/longevity|longevity]]. Most of the web is built for today: frameworks fall out of support, hosting plans get deprecated, and content rots. The Long Web asks what it takes to make a site outlive its tools.

Adapted from [[https://brennan.day/how-are-we-preparing-for-the-long-web/|How are we preparing for the Long Web?]] on brennan.day.

===== What Fails =====

  * **Frameworks.** AngularJS, Backbone.js, Ember.js, Meteor, Gatsby, and Apache Cordova are all dead or unmaintained. Sites built on the hottest framework inherit its lifespan.
  * **Hosting.** Netlify's free plan is already in [[https://docs.netlify.com/manage/accounts-and-billing/billing/billing-for-legacy-plans/legacy-pricing-plans/|legacy mode]]. Heroku has stopped offering enterprise contracts to new customers. Paying does not guarantee survival.
  * **Domains.** The maximum registration period for a domain is ten years. Renewal is a standing commitment, not a one-time purchase.
  * **Hardware.** Consumer hard drives are [[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-drives-last/|rated for three to five years]]. Motherboard capacitors [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague|can fail after fifteen or twenty]]. Connector standards die too: a 2005 drive may have nothing to plug into by 2035.

===== The Scale of Loss =====

A [[https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/|2024 Pew Research Center study]] found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible. One quarter of all news articles contain at least one dead link.

===== What Works =====

  * **Posthaven:** launched in 2013 by the founders of Posterous after Twitter killed it. Designed to never shut down.
  * **WordPress.com 100-Year Plan:** [[https://wordpress.com/blog/2025/02/12/100-year-domains-plans/|launched 2025]]: century-long hosting with trusts, mirrored datacenters, and Wayback Machine snapshots. It raises the question of whether the company itself will last that long.
  * **The Internet Archive:** the [[https://web.archive.org/|Wayback Machine]] holds over 800 billion pages and adds about 650 million a day, on a nonprofit donation model.
  * **Boring technology:** static HTML, plain text, and formats that do not depend on a vendor's runtime.
  * **Redundancy:** copies in more than one place beat any single durable host. See [[indieweb:offline_knowledge|Offline Knowledge Preservation]].
  * **Permacomputing:** repairable, long-lived hardware and software. See [[folkzone:permacomputing|Permacomputing]] and the [[https://www.opencompute.org/|Open Compute Project]].

===== See Also =====

  * [[indieweb:start|IndieWeb]]
  * [[indieweb:offline_knowledge|Offline Knowledge Preservation]]
  * [[indieweb:principles|Principles]]
  * [[indieweb:domain_of_ones_own|A Domain of One's Own]]
  * [[indieweb:staying_findable|Staying Findable]]
  * [[folkzone:permacomputing|Permacomputing]]
  * [[https://indieweb.org/longevity|indieweb.org: longevity]]
  * [[start|Return to wiki home]]