In 48 BC the library of Alexandria burned down.

On that day humanity lost one of the largest collections of knowledge at the time. Now 2000 years later all this knowledge would probably insignificant. Or maybe not - it might be interesting for history, archeology and fiction.

This is the first time we have the technology to store vast amounts of data in very little space. Even for your parents generation which has access to digital media had to make strict decisions on what to keep and what to throw out. We might also be one of the first few generations that are rich enough to have the leisure time to care about data: We care about media, movies, series, music, art. We care about health data, hearth rates, sleep tracking, exercise data, calories, weight and their potential benefits in heathcare decisions. We care about documentation of business processes. We care about all sorts of data.

But our storage still isn't endless. We have to decide what to keep.

It pains me to look at the discussion page of Wikipedia articles. Moderators remove all sorts of information due to being irrelevant. Makes sense to some extent since Wikipedia is supposed to be a dictionary introduction to topics and not the collection all knowledge.

But when we rebuild this on a decentralized internet - shouldn't there be an endless further reading and further reading and further reading? For me there is no such thing as data that is too irrelevant. There is only incorrect sorting that wastes your time.

Especially with hyperefficient parsing methods like scrapers and LLMs we could read all data with the correct broadness or tiny niche desired.

It's baffeling to me how hard it is to watch an Oscar winning movies from the 30s. The 1930s were very recently in the grand scheme of things. And these movies were important enough to get a literal Academy Award. Netflix or Disney+? Nope. Apple or Amazon buy individual films? nope. Torrent? Good, 5 people are seeding. 5 people, in a world with millions of Americans and billions of people world wide.

Enter: Marion Stokes.

Marion Stokes was a woman that compulsively recorded television from 1977 until 2012. This exactly what I'm talking about. It is extraordinary that stuff was important enough at the time to stream it out to the whole nation and millions of viewers but nobody but a random person cared enough to save it.

Maybe you don't think TV is worth saving. That's okay, but you get the idea.

I personally think the following data is worth saving:

Lastly, I want to recommend some resources

I already mentioned the future of the decentralized web. Using torrents as data storage on a humanity level already only worked medium good. What makes us think it will be better when we try again with the next generation of decentralized web or that this old try might ever become better?

This is a cool software for taking notes in .md files. You can link them to one another to a graph of a "second brain".

A chatbot to parse your data locally. No internet required: https://github.com/imartinez/privateGPT

People who are as obsessed with this topic as I am.

This was a chaotic ramble about the future of data hoarding and usage. I just want to know: