Comment by danabramov
1 month ago
Not sure I fully get you... In your example, isn't the problem that nobody cares about this data? So there is no motivation to build a client. Whereas if these were beloved notes or minisites or whatever that got wiped out by the latest acquisition (e.g. see https://bento.me/ shutting down), people would know exactly what those are, and there would be incentive for someone to compete for the userbase.
E.g. Blento (https://blento.app/) is atproto Bento that I only saw a couple of days ago. But the cool thing is that if it shuts down, not only someone else can set it up again (it's open source), but they're also gonna be able to render all of the users' existing content. I think that's a meaningful step forward for this use case.
Yes, there's gonna be tons of stuff on the network that's too niche, but then there's no harm in it either. Whereas wherever there is enough interest, someone can step in and provide the code for the data.
I'm saying it would be a lot simpler to just provide an API to download the data. I don't think it's worth the complexity and network of PDS' to preserve this data in perpetuity, but even if I did, nothing would stop me from using the download API and storing tapes in Iron Mountain or whatever.
I think there's also weird cases where you don't really want things replicated: revenge porn, snuff, CSAM, etc. Like, if someone we're like "yes it's true we lose all data forever if we shut down, but we're not indiscriminately pushing some of the worst content to everyone replicating" I'd take that tradeoff immediately.