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KronisLV 10 hours ago

We should just have some standard for crawlable archived versions of pages with no back end or DB interaction behind them etc., for example if there's a reverse proxy, whatever it outputs is archived and it wouldn't actually pass on any call in the archive version. Same for translating the output of any dynamic JS into fully static HTML. Then add some proof-of-work that works without JS and is a web standard (e.g. server sends header, client sends correct response, gets access to archive) and mainstream the culture for low-cost hosting for such archives and you're done, also make sure that this sort of feature is enabled in the most basic configuration for all web servers and such, logged separately.

Obviously such a thing will never happen, because the web and culture went in a different direction. But if it were a mainstream thing, you'd get easy to consume archives (also for regular archival and data hoarding) and the "live" versions of sites wouldn't have their logs be bogged down by stupid spam.

Or if PoW was a proper web standard with no JS, then ppl who want to tell AI and other crawlers to fuck off, they could at least make it uneconomical to crawl their stuff en masse. In my view, proof of work that would work through headers in the current day world should be as ubiquitous as TLS.