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10:11 pm
I've told you a little about the history of our relationship with Cloudflare above; now let me tell you about archive.org and how did it happen that people started to confuse us. We created a service similar to Megalodon, which was already quite popular in Japan. First, we had to choose a domain zone. Not the USA or the EU (the current horrors hadn't happened yet, but SOPA and PIPA was already being planned), and not the Caribbean, where a registrar's server could crash and take months to recover. Libya (.ly) was fashionable at the time, but Gaddafi had just been killed. So Iceland seemed interesting: there were bearded sysadmins in parliament, they created Mailpile. Then we looked at which single-word domains were available. When we started, archive.org didn't have a "Save Now" function, so our features didn't overlap at all. Even our names are different, just homonyms: archive.org is a noun, while we are a verb: "archive.is/today" was intended as an imperative, like "Save Now!" Then two things happened. First, archive.org introduced its "Save Now" feature. Second, when we finally started communicating—around 2020—Mark mentioned that they come from a background of left-wing activism (this isn't a secret; their biographies are public; I just hadn't looked into them until it was brought to my attention). By that time, Gamergate and various other scandals had already occurred. With few small exceptions, the right tended to preserve pages, while the left wanted to delete them. That was my aha moment: no collaborations were possible here. And so we became a kind of dialectical pair: we won't delete what they delete, and vice versa, even when politics isn't involved. This is what's driving us in this direction, toward the role of a smaller archive.org. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know yet.