I’m curious about how everyone is preparing to leave their Ghost site as a legacy. For Ghost-hosted publications, all content disappears after you’re gone. Do you have any solutions for preserving it? Obviously, Ghost doesn’t care about its longevity if revenue stops.
First of all, thank you for bringing this. The topic of digital legacy is a growing problem that becomes more important every day. For years, I have frequently exchanged ideas with people around me about how a solution could be developed for this issue. It seems difficult to produce a permanent and long-term solution without certain structural guarantors. Any individual or institutional solution can only last as long as the lifetime of those individuals or institutions.
I am currently continuing to host the websites of three acquaintances who have passed away for years. This year, a Synaps Media customer also passed away. Before their passing, I had the chance to get in touch with them, and he asked me to keep his website online even after their death. I will do my best to keep his websites online as well.
Last year, while thinking about what I could do as Synaps Media regarding this issue, I made some plans. With a feature I named the “Synaps Media Archival Project,” I will continue to keep the websites of customers who are subscribed to a paid plan at Synaps Media and who wish to participate in this project online even if their subscription expires and I can no longer receive payment (using their custom domain until it expires, and afterward under synaps.media subdomain).
In this way, I want to demonstrate a commitment to preventing websites—which are the products of people’s efforts and accumulated work—from disappearing due to death (or financial hardship). I also continue to think about what can be done to ensure that this does not remain limited to the lifetime of myself and Synaps Media.
This is still in development, but I wanted to share the direction now since the timing felt right. If this matters to you, I’d like to hear what would make it trustworthy.
I’m currently hosting my old website for the purpose of archive and legacy preserving, a couple of days ago I watched an interview with the founders of The Internet Archive and my awareness about the importance of the issue grow even more.
I think at the moment, the best way to preserve our digital culture is to grow awareness and support their project at Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine and if you are an USA citizen, it’s deductible from your taxes.
BTW, I congratulate @muratcorlu for his initiative, it’s a healthy and valuable way to do business and also contribute to society.
I agree that this is a topic of growing importance. Early web users are aging and their URLs have accumulated citation/link equity. While one can think of approaches to preserving the ‘content’, this is only one part of a service. I would like my current URLs to continue to resolve appropriately, for example, wherever the content might reside. Personal web publishing now involves a bundle of name registration, DNS, CMS and hosting contracts, etc.
Recently, I have seen the following very different examples where the legacy issue is being addressed: permanent.org; a discussion of what steps technologist and scholar Martin Paul Eve is taking to ensure persistence of his historical blog content; and the introduction of KeepRight, “an open protocol to record and share instructions for keeping things long-term.” Each touches elements of the overall issue - respectively, a third party preservation service for content, a set of individual actor steps being taken by a well known scholar, and an intiative about declared rights in legacy content.
Is this something that Ghost has on its agenda? With partners? I know that I would be willing to invest (modestly) into an arrangement that assures ongoing access for, say, twenty years (understanding that one cannot guarantee 20 year persistence :-)). I wonder how many other clients would? Some examples …
- it would be interesting to explore a 'successor account’ process, where billing, ownership and DNS control could be transferred to an executor. For this to work well it would need to be agreed by a variety of providers.
- I have not looked closely at the JSON export. How easy would it be to rebuild your site as a static website if, again, an executor took it over?
- https://www.permanent.org/ above is an interesting, if early, service. It clearly cannot guarantee its own persistence and commercial viability. What ‘digital estate’ services exist that might be partnered with (including Internet Archive, mentioned above).
This is a big and complex topic … but it will only get more important. I would be interested to hear if others have thought about it or see a role for Ghost.
Lorcan
p.s. ‘preservation’ or ‘persistence’ is a promise - it depends on social arrangements over time. So while technical solutions are important (see the work on identifiers for example - ark, purl, handle, etc) they themselves don’t guarantee persistence. This depends on ‘structural guarantors’ to use the nice phrase introduced earlier in this thread.
Preservation equals storage + availability.
atm I have a browser extension from the Internet archive that auto crawls sites I visit
that way my posts update when I add it change them
Self-hosting is the only reliable method for preserve something on those days. Everything else is subject to institutions, laws and goverments.
For those who trust Archive well-known sites, good luck trying to get the removed X tweets and images.
We are in 1984. Wake up, Neo.
When we are alive, sure, it can be the safest option to control your content. But when we passed away, self-hosting is the least reliable method for keeping it running after us 
Got it, I think IPFS is what you are looking for:
Something like this mirrors of Wikipedia after some Turkish Court banned it: https://en.wikipedia-on-ipfs.org/
Thank you. Nice list of tools. I’ll investigate on them to check how can they be used for keeping a Ghost site live forever even without a hosting running behind it anymore.