Are there any alternatives to the Internet Archive that are built around P2P, so that everyone can contribute to hosting/sharing web archives? Seems like having all these important archives hosted by a single organization isn’t the best idea for longevity/redundancy
We have already the technology for sharing with P2P, lot of Torrent websites. The problem is, sharing with P2P is illegal, if you don’t have the rights to. Internet Archive is different, because they have special rights we users don’t have, such as being a library in the US with rights of a library.
In example Internet Archive is allowed to share books, but only lend one at a time for each real local copy they have.
Downloading from Internet Archive is harmless and only Internet Archive and your ISP knows your IP when doing so. But with P2P (if we are talking about Torrents) everyone who connects to it knows the IP from everyone else. There is a higher risk for uploading stuff, or sharing with others. Basically the government can join the P2P network and suddenly see everyone.