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 IndieWeb Summit 2016 and is related to the IndieWeb principle of 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 How are we preparing for the Long Web? on brennan.day.

• 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 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 rated for three to five years. Motherboard capacitors can fail after fifteen or twenty. Connector standards die too: a 2005 drive may have nothing to plug into by 2035.

A 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.

• Posthaven: launched in 2013 by the founders of Posterous after Twitter killed it. Designed to never shut down.
• WordPress.com 100-Year Plan: 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 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 Offline Knowledge Preservation.
• Permacomputing: repairable, long-lived hardware and software. See Permacomputing and the Open Compute Project.

• IndieWeb
• Offline Knowledge Preservation
• Principles
• A Domain of One's Own
• Staying Findable
• Permacomputing
• indieweb.org: longevity
• Return to wiki home