Everyone here knows the importance of archive sites. They fill in the memory hole. That alone makes them incredibly valuable. But they're centralized, which means once they're down all that filling gets dug up again. Plus it costs money to host that much data.
What do you guys think of a program that essentially does the same thing as archive sites, but it downloads the archive to your computer instead? I'm a software developer and could create it myself rather easily.
Now I know what you're thinking: archive sites are valuable because they're probably not tampered with, because tampering means they can be dismissed by their opponents as fake. Local archives can be tampered with, making them useless. However, this program would encrypt the archives such that they can only be viewed if first unecrypted by that same program. The user would have zero power over the encrypted archives, and would act entirely as a host for them.
Considering how tightly the iron grip of progressivism has become around the throat of the internet, it's only a matter of time before archive sites are made illegal, or at least taken down under some bullshit excuse. Local archives would make this less of an issue, because each archive would continue to exist as long as at least one person still has it.
Do you think people would use such a tool? It would be completely free, but couldn't be open source for security reasons.
I know anyone can already just download a page and encrypt it themselves, but most people wouldn't even think to do that much less know how. This program would make encrypted local backups normie-friendly and standardized, because the important thing is having as many as possible.
There’s Webrecorder which apparently has a Chrome/Chromium add-on, along with pywb for playback. I’ve used the software before in projects but I haven’t tried the add-on.