I've become a dev again. I have been building something in stealth mode up till now.

PageHold is a distributed version of the Wayback machine (Web Archive).
https://pagehold.cloud/
Holding page for now, it only contains a copy of mikehardcastle.com

The wayback machine (web archive) is a great historical resource for the web, giving snapshots of the web going back to 1996.

It suffers, however, from capacity and funding issues. As well as being under regular attacks, both legally and technically.

So I figured it was time to decentralise and build an app that allowed anybody to take web snapshots to store locally and share them globally.

I have just published a standalone version of this tool on GitHub:
https://github.com/snurge/pagehold


Feel free to download, play and contribute however you like.

The next stage will be to launch a global federated service that allows individuals to add their personal archives to a global, searchable resource and provide a public search engine.

I have already built this infrastructure, but I wanted to test the standalone service first before launching a fully federated service. Apart from the technical challenges, there are many legal, copyright and other issues surrounding a public service.

I am considering building in revenue stream options;

Either for myself, by offering pre-configured VPS versions that can be spun up and run as a paid for service.

Or by using a high search usage charging model, charging individuals or companies fees for bulk archive searching. This would collect and distribute fees among content contributors.

These are all options ready to go, depending on the feedback.

Before you ask, this isn’t a Bitcoin or NOSTR model, but I expect it will evolve into both over time.