"They seemed to have developed a communication system which probably connected all the settlements of the planet. Almost all data storage technology was obliterated by a solar event millions of years ago, but archaeologists have discovered scattered hardware media surviving in subsurface dwellings. While most data is beyond recovery, the dozens of known data samples conforming to recognizable formats identified are all, invariably, pictures of quadrupedal mammals or up close images of genitalia. The meaning of this finding is under intense debate."

It's much worse than this. Digital media is not durable in any archivally/archaeologically relevant sense of the word. Magnetic tape in a bunker, maybe, but that'll leave exoarchaeologists with mainly data about finance. Spinning rust in a data center (where most of "the internet" is) has an operational lifespan measured in single-digit years, and SSDs not substantially better. Any actual data that survives a disaster will almost certainly be unreadable without an electron microscope since all the related tech will be long gone.

God, two years ago I had an idea for a story about archaeologists in 2222 (after a huge geomagnetic storm / solar flare / whatever you call it circa 2100, among other things) trying to learn about trans culture in the 2020s by essentially diving into flooded coastal cities and trying to find old hard drives or SSDs and trying to recover the data despite the damage done to them. This just reminded me of that. It sounds like a really interesting premise but I also don't think I have the skills to write it myself.

Rest assured, each blockchain node contains an entire copy of the blockchain. Your NFTs are safe.

When I find a recipe that works I just write it down in a spiral cookbook my wife got in a buy nothing group.

Searching for recipes is such a hellscape, and it’s bound to get worse with AI telling us to put fucking glue in everything.

I'm ok with that. I got the only good thing I needed out of the internet: my girlfriend. Everything else I can live without.

The content of the internet would not exist but the remains of its infrastructure would survive so presumably alien anthropologists would be able to infer a lot from that

Ill start doing my part and printing out all my favorite memes so the aliens know what made me chuckle.

Somebody posted this article here a couple years ago with the thesis that the internet will not survive, and that was before LM saturation.

Probably, seconding the architecture of the internet or people with computers somehow still functional having small offline copies of pages. For a more positive spin on this eventually the internet will be replaced by something different through time, ideally better with its own set of problems, so in that sense the internet as we know of it will be a footnote for future generations over long enough time.

It's interesting how an alien civilization finding hard drives and stuff after our extinction would probably have a really hard time reverse engineering the way we store information and what that information even is. It even comes down to what their mathematics looks like. The binary system alone, and number bases in general, already require quite a lot of maths if you reduce them to their primitive functions. Going as far as to assume they have the same maths as us and have figured out binary system data representation, they still need to reverse engineer a crapton of computer science theory, with help from any physical books that can be found.

Semi related rant:

Honestly with how the internet is right now, I hate it more than I like it. There are very few places I can visit on it for fun. Lemmygrad and Hexbear are like me refuges from the ever encroaching slop and neocities is the place to explore. Youtube is like the only mainstream social media that I still use, but if not for my addiction to it I think I would've dumped it long ago. Gotta keep trying to do so I guess.

Overall it's even more horrible to actually look for useful information, all of it fucking sucks whether it is SEO or AI garbage. And because the Internet is such a core part of computing, it's hard to imagine it without it... Like how the fuck else am I going to get software on my system? Yeah sure, Debian can packages from CDs, but that is a remnant from a different time.

I want to love the internet, and in the deepness of my heart I really do. But capitalism is making that harder every day. And another part why I'm hating the internet more and more, is because of how entrenching it is and how destructive it is to other types of media storage or presentation. Text, video, sound, games, it's encompassing everything now. Even digital media slowly but surely will stop existing on physical media, and that's why I'm creating and curating my own home archive library. Because I don't know when that one site finally goes offline, and when it does... I'll miss it.

It's not much, it's futile, maybe idiotic. But I love doing this. I love having my data locally, well preserved for myself. But there's just so much garbage, it's only a tiny curated set that I nonetheless love sharing with people, because I care about it's quality.

I'm very conflicted on how I feel about the Internet, just it, computers I love.

Actually, now that I've thought about the shit I wrote above. I don't think I really have an issue with the Internet, but with the World Wide Web. I need to think and read more about it.

It will be replaced with another one. When the Library of Alexandria burned down they didn't give up on books.

Are you not underestimating the decentralisation of the internet? We're talking about stuff that is everywhere, and being very deliberately archived and well-protected in tens, hundreds of thousands of dedicated areas around the globe.

Something like a giant meteor would probably be the best case for the internet staying permanently accessible - Meteor blows up a few thousand square miles, sunlight blockages + toxic gas kill off all/most of humanity in a couple years, and datacentres will probably be left relatively unscathed so pretty much the whole internet will be recoverable for at least a few thousand years. More protected archives may be recoverable for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

I think, short of a catastrophic event that covers the whole globe in a few feet of lava, significant amounts of the internet will live on in recoverable archives.

I think if the internet is ever to be turned into a footnote, it'll be by the impermanence of society - Eventually people will stop caring, move onto internet 2 and that's all it'll take for people to slow chuck out and demolish the data. But obviously, given the massive density of information storage, one dedicated archive is all it takes to mostly survive, it'll only take <100 hard drives, or tapes, to store everything everyone ever publicly wrote on the internet (assuming we can filter out the AI garbage). Videos, games, hi-res pictures etc. the archiver might have to be more picky.

Data centers are 99.9% encrypted hard drives, a scavenger has a good chances of finding working ones, but no chance of decrypting a single one, and extraordinarily tiny chance of restoring one of the internet's current backbones, S3. The chances of finding an unencrypted hard drive strongly correlates with finding a relatively small (non-notable) company or hobbyist user's activity. Most small datacenter tenants are sharing multiple encrypted hard drives with other smaller tenants.

When an internet ending event happens, data centered could be physically destroyed, or there could be economic reasons that clients drop services, their data will probably get overwritten with a few waves of desperate clearance priced offers by the data centers, then data center employees will one day stop showing up to work. Each data center could have a different story. CEO went AWOL? Employees just stop showing up (layoffs? died? stayed home to conserve gas? stayed home to protect family from bandits?). Security contractors abandoned the data center and other clients to take up a contract with government's last attempt to keep things under control? Decided to become a billionaire's armed militia?

As for personal computers, windows 10 encrypts user drives by default. Unless you're lucky and guess a bad password, only pre-2015 windows computers will be widely unencrypted. You might not be able to figure out how to login to that computer, but you'll be able to see some files with a linux liveCD/liveUSB.

I have no idea what percent of hobbyist linux desktop/laptop installs will be unencrypted.

I hope it does. This whole machine can go fuck itself