TL;DR: moar exports / P2P. One example of this is StackExchange dumps seen here.
What I think would make this forum better is reasons to trust that it is a place of record for serious intellectual and cultural discourse, to which one can commit the best fruits of one’s mind; that would remain a part of this universe, and not be thrown into the memory hole on a whim…
As you know, I have a history of getting very attached to the forums in which I participate, and get quite irate when thousands of hours of my “brilliant” writings (and the context in which they were written) go down the toilet. I consider such purges to be horrible violations of intellectual principles, and that travesty (including that no one else gave a damn) was the biggest blow that has pushed me away from trusting anything having to do with the FSP.
Yes, I have the backup that I paid for, but I’ve been too depressed to create a mirror site (for which I’m sure someone would accuse me of wrong-doing). As I explained at the time, archive.org had failed to fully archive the old forum externally, and no one else did either (due to my lack of proactive action at the time). The Internet has evolved quite a bit since then, and there are multiple Web snapshot engines (ex) that can be easily used to archive all posts (including embedded images and links), but that still requires proactive vigilance…
Maybe, if I overcome my depression and start coding again, I could create some kind of a libertarian search engine, which crawls just the libertarian-interest sites, with additional IPFS mirroring and exporting ZIM files so people could download the whole domain in one file. But of course hosting costs for this would be rather high for someone who had destroyed his career with tax resistance and is living alone in a tent in the woods… It’s much more likely that I am a lost cause - drinking myself to death is much easier. I’m just astonished that no one else has done this in my place…
