Internet Archive Switzerland

https://blog.archive.org/2026/05/06/internet-archive-switzerland-expanding-a-global-mission-to-preserve-knowledge/

by hggh • 2 months ago

702 105 2 months ago

blog.archive.org

https://internetarchive.ch/

damnitbuilds• 3 months ago

"Its efforts will initially focus on [...] and collecting the generative AI wave that is currently upon us all."

Why would they want to collect the AI wave ?!

But about time the Internet Archive had a US-independent backup.

kinow• 3 months ago

But about time the Internet Archive had a US-independent backup.

Agreed!

The Internet Archive Switzerland, online at https://internetarchive.ch/, is a newly-formed Swiss non-profit foundation that will operate independently within its national context.

I think the Wikipedia Editors will have to decide whether they will add it to the existing page. The Operations section is still listing only U.S. data centers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#Operations

rbanffy2• 2 months ago

I wonder how long does it take to back it up.

userbinator• 2 months ago

There are some real gems in the sea of slop; and as archivists and historians, they shouldn't moderate.

Anamon• 2 months ago

I might be overlooking something, but is a mirror of the Internet Archive even mentioned as a plan anywhere here? It was my first thought after reading the headline, too, but the website only speaks of archiving LLMs and, vaguely, some other collections, but not, for instance, the Wayback Machine.

Vasbarlog• 2 months ago

Hugged to death? I can’t access the page.

alessandroberna• 2 months ago

Seems likely, same for me.

Hendrikto• 2 months ago

Same for me. I cannot access it either.

sixie6e• 2 months ago

I am able to.

embedding-shape• 2 months ago

Have you tried just letting it load? Took maybe more than 30 seconds for the page to load for me, but it did load eventually.

KomoD• 2 months ago

Yep, just loading forever.

AndroTux• 2 months ago

They just want everyone coming from archive.org to feel right at home

pedroneto3• 2 months ago

I am able too

insom3• 2 months ago

That website is really struggling. Very tempting to go to a mirror on archive.org to view it :)

This seems very distinct from Internet Archive in the US, I wonder how separate it is.

Internet Archive Canada (I worked there in 2024) operated like it was a subsidiary, even though I think it was technically an independent organization with some shared directors. Same Slack, same archive.org email domain, etc.

IA.ch has Brewster and Caslon on the board.

I suspect that for the political threats of the current decade the different Internet Archive organisations need to start operating more independently, especially when it comes to funding?

crossroadsguy• 2 months ago

They use Slack? I am kind of surprised. But I am sure on the plus side, that would also mean having to worry about one less uptime.

insom3• 2 months ago

Slack, Zoom and Google Apps (but not for email) - otherwise basically everything was internally ran.

The Slack has (had?) hundreds of guest accounts due to volunteers and allied organizations. It’s an interesting (and cool) institution!

Intralexical2• 2 months ago

Can you share more about your time at the Canadian one? I feel like there was a big hullabaloo about it years ago, but it's not really clear what they do.

insom3• 2 months ago

Not sure what hullabaloo -- they do provide a bunch of services to Canadian institutions (including Libraries and Archives Canada) and they perform physical services like book scanning and in the last few years I believe they are the parent organization for the physical Canadian datacentre _somewhere in BC_.

For my work, I worked in their Archiving & Data Services department, on https://archive-it.org/ -- I didn't know this before I joined, but Internet Archive offers various for-pay services to other cultural institutions, mostly around archiving their stuff or white-labelling playback of archives.

For example https://webarchiveweb.bac-lac.canada.ca/ (the Government of Canada's own Internet Archive) is actually outsourced to ADS within Internet Archive.

On one hand this is neat, as IA have expertise around this, but on the other hand (as a Canadian) I don't like that it's not actually sovereign and that it looks like it's run by our government but that it's not. Tradeoffs, I guess.

springtimesun2• 2 months ago

Ah, good, they are also mirroring the page load speed of the internet archive

trvz• 2 months ago

Typical for something made in St. Gallen. A sensible web developer from Zurich interested in the topic would have created this website in just a single HTML and an optional CSS file.

4ggr0• 2 months ago

a dev from ZH would've added a blockchain, mobile app and hosted it on an over-allocated kubernetes cluster. 97% uptime and you need a macbook pro so the website doesn't stutter.

dang2• 2 months ago

Normally we'd reply with "please don't do regional flamewar on HN" but this sounds so good-humored to me that I've canceled the (no doubt well-intentioned) downvotes instead.

Edit: now someone is going to tell me how mean internecine Swiss conflict actually is...

input_sh• 2 months ago

Relevant blog post: https://blog.archive.org/2026/05/06/internet-archive-switzer...

Internet Archive Switzerland joins a growing group of mission-aligned organizations, alongside Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and Internet Archive Europe. Together, these independent libraries strengthen a shared vision: building a distributed, resilient digital library for the world.

card_zero• 2 months ago

I was interested in the others, but https://www.internetarchive.eu is a horrible corporate-looking site with a hero image, a boast about AI, a carousel of news that won't scroll with doing its slow scroll animation, a huge "meet the team" section with mugshots and boring profiles, social media links, a newsletter signup form, and nothing to say where the actual archive is.

carlosjobim• 2 months ago

Reading what little information they have there, they aren't a public facing or public serving organization. They seem to provide their services to institutions only:

"working with dozens of European libraries and government agencies to build web collections, Internet Archive Europe prioritized collaboration with cultural heritage organizations to safeguard our collective history."

ferongr• 2 months ago

Looks like an "organization" tailor made to be awarded EU funds for their "mission".

justusthane• 2 months ago

I was excited to see there's a Canadian one, but it's just a Wordpress blog?

ConceptJunkie• 2 months ago

Somewhere there's a "create a random, soulless, corporate website generator", and these folks used it.

rbanffy2• 2 months ago

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48068333, but got little traction.

dang2• 2 months ago

Thanks! Since the submitted URL https://internetarchive.ch/ seems to be down, I've put your link at the top and moved the other to the toptext.

red_admiral• 2 months ago

Sankt Gallen's more physical archive is worth a visit too: https://www.stiftsbezirk.ch/de/stiftsbibliothek/

woodson• 2 months ago

Indeed. And the one in Admont, Austria: https://stiftadmont.at/en/about-the-abbey-library/

DeadEye2111• 2 months ago

Very proud of my alma mater town to be a place for this. It’s much needed infrastructure for Europe.

zkmon• 2 months ago

Anything that is being built today, based on the assumptions about the future that extend into multiple years, is bound to fade away. Because the "future no longer what it used be". What's the envisaged future context and purpose where this would save the world?

consumer451• 2 months ago

Stop complaining about availability. Instead, create a solution.

If tpb dot org can still exist ...

At least these people tried. We need a p2p archive solution ASAP. Before our history is entirely re-written.

arjie• 2 months ago

I don’t think the problem lends itself well to decentralization. People have tried to use IPFS et al for this. There were even IA attempts https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-gateway

No one has cracked this one yet.

tylerchilds3• 2 months ago

It has been cracked.

The internet itself is the thing we want.

We’re just constantly in denial that the internet actually does the thing we want it to do.

The internet archive is an excellent demonstration of how to do it.

It’s primarily getting a ragtag group to pool resources and manage them and then gossip with other groups that are doing the same thing.

I’ve spent so much time around the archive that I plainly see a divide between internet people online that can’t connect the dots and internet people in real life that are confused as to why the dots aren’t connecting.

The easiest way to see the dots is to:

1. Stop trying to make money

2. Tally the things that cost money

3. Amortize the upkeep over time

E.g. where do we source resources from, where do we store resources and how do we secure them.

Like HTTP, but for physical materials, not digital.

Intralexical2• 2 months ago

They've been constantly trying to set up P2P solutions. Torrents, DWEB, IPFS, Filecoin, WebTorrent, YJS, whole bunch of tech acronyms. I'm not sure much of it has really caught on?

https://blog.archive.org/tag/decentralized-web/

https://github.com/internetarchive/dweb-transports

Third-party attempt:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

Turns out it's hard! Or maybe just too niche. But you can also help them today, by seeding some of collections that are available as torrents.

arian_• 2 months ago

Finally a Swiss account I can afford to open.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 months ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20260409034921if_/https://intern...

idovmamane• 2 months ago

St Gallen has been archiving knowledge for over a thousand years. Now they are archiving AI models before they get retrained out of existence. The location is not a coincidence…

ok123456• 2 months ago

Where's the search bar at the top to search the archive?

ukanhaupa• 2 months ago

cool!

imtomt• 2 months ago

Huh. I can’t find the actual... archive. It mentions an AI archive less than 10 sentences in, and has a couple of links, but seems void of any actually archived content.

colinmegill2• 2 months ago

If you are running that thing, and reading this post: just do the right thing and get your own name.

moontear• 2 months ago

Uhm... https://blog.archive.org/2026/05/06/internet-archive-switzer...

colinmegill2• 2 months ago

I guess I stand corrected, but I maintain it was word salad :)

teew• 2 months ago

The About Us section states:

We are a team of change-makers who believe that every helping hand can raise a child and create a better future for them.

Which I found weird. And searching for this phrase yields many site-hits verbatim, which is even weirder. Anyone know what is up with that? Is it some kind of filler text?

Edit: I guess it's from a template, the Contact section is also mumbo-jumbo (address: 123 Fifth Avenue, NY and so on).

malicka• 2 months ago

That doesn’t exactly instill confidence, honestly…

basilikum• 2 months ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20260509154320/https://interneta...

miki1232112• 2 months ago

IA needs to do what Usenet has done. Have a bunch of mission-aligned but unrelated orgs (under different ownership and distributed around the world) that peer with each other, distribute all the content obtained by any of the orgs to each other, but that have no technical channel nor capability to distribute DMCA complaints and takedown requests.

This is (AFAIK) basically how Usenet piracy works. You send your warez to one provider, and that provider instantly replicates them to all the providers they peer with, recursively, until they eventually reach the entire network. When any of those providers get a DMCA complaint, they remove the offending files (as they're required to do by law), but they don't inform other providers that they've received a DMCA notice, so those providers keep serving those files. This makes it much harder to remove data from the network than it is to add it.

y3ahd0g2• 2 months ago

So they should use bit torrent.

IMO personal security would only be improved if we diversified away from "the open web".

"Flood the field" with protocols and pre-shared key networks where we have to generate keys together in meat space, make it too expensive to operate the panopticon.

Everyone putting their eggs in the open web basket, gathering in that public commons means all it takes is one bomb on us all, so to speak.

LocalH• 2 months ago

BitTorrent allows untrusted users (read: industry plants) to connect and slurp down direct IP addresses to swarm participants. It's an unanswered legal question whether low-level uploading (such as the percentages one would get as a "leech", connecting to the torrent and then disconnecting immediately after completion) might fall under "fair use" or "fair dealing" statutes in various jurisdictions.

US-centric here: I feel that uploading a small percentage of a file as a condition of downloading the whole thing may very well fall under fair use - most BT traffic is noncommercial, the portion of the covered work uploaded by "leeches" is very small and probably would be covered by the "30-second" rule often quoted in fair use discussions. The only really arguable point is the "effect on the work's value", but then again an average leech is not uploading enough of the work to have that much of a material effect on the work's value.

cbdevidal• 2 months ago

I like it in theory but the IA hosts over 175PB of data. Wonder how many other producers could replicate that data.

aryonoco• 2 months ago

I don’t have hard data to back this up, but I estimate that plenty of main Usenet binary providers easily exceed that.

AnthonyMouse• 2 months ago

Suppose you don't have ten hosts that each have 175PB of data but rather a million hosts that each have an average of 1.75TB, and therefore the equivalent of 10 full copies. And then something that periodically checks if there is any given subset of the data with too few copies and makes more.

pocksuppet5• 2 months ago

There are only 3-4 providers because the system is spammed with hundreds of terabytes of new data per day by actors seeking to destroy it. They can't moderate the spam because the pirated data is all encrypted so indistinguishable from random data, and because moderation would destroy their pretense of not knowing what content is being posted.

anthk• 2 months ago

Spam is dead since Google Groups dissappeared and most people just use non-binary newsgroups for high tech/culture talks.

topranks• 2 months ago

Usenet is a distributed policy from the ground up.

It’s centralised in the way you describe now that it’s only used for large files / piracy, but it used to me much more diverse.

latenightcoding• 2 months ago

> Gen AI ARchive

isn't this a nightmare for privacy

addedGone• 2 months ago

Let's hope they don't use Google captcha and KYC everyone.

Animats• 2 months ago

Oh, good. We need more backups.

The one in Egypt doesn't get updated.

kennykartman• 2 months ago

I'm so happy about this. Really. I cannot overstate how much important the internet archive is for all of us.

anant-singhal• 2 months ago

The uncomfortable part is that “preserving knowledge” sounds universally good until copyright law present themselves.

jrochkind1• 2 months ago

collecting the generative AI wave that is currently upon us all.

I don't understand what this means?

bl4ckneon• 2 months ago

I had the same thought. Does that mean they are archiving a bunch of Ai stuff? Doesn't sound right to me

dopidopHN2• 2 months ago

I have a related question on the domain archive.org

I've noticed that this domain now host content subject to copyright.

As a example : entire season of startrek "voyager" are randomly hosted there in direct download.

Why? Is that not a liability?

hggh• 2 months ago

Internet Archive is a library. Libraries host copyrighted content. Libraries are good.

badlibrarian3• 2 months ago

Libraries license the content they host. Internet Archive didn't. And nearly got sued out of existence because of it.

badlibrarian3• 2 months ago

They've always had tons of copyrighted material on there. People report it, sometimes they take it down. Sometimes they pick fights and lose.

“We survived,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Ars. “But it wiped out the Library.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/the-internet-arc...

butz• 2 months ago

Out of the frying pan into the fire?

Internet Archive Switzerland

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