The Internet Archive is Popping Rivets: A Thread

If you're a non-profit serving terabytes of data to millions of people every day and you're NOT being funded by VCs and selling personal information.... then you want to run things as inexpensively and close-to-the-bone as possible. It's how you survive.

This has worked nicely for @internetarchive and it has survived multiple economic storms and changes in the world, expanding and shrinking as it can. It's cliche' to say "But this time is different"

But this time is different

A lot of people are out of work, a lot of businesses are closing up or tightening belts... but the audience for using something like our books, music, wayback machine has greatly, intensely increased.

It's almost like Libraries help in times of economic/societal downturn!

People are noticing that the Archive is slowing down here or there. Searches sometimes take longer, or the download/upload speeds shift across the day, or some other issue is cropping up. I'm in the Slack channels. We definitely know about it. It's from success and renewed effort

In the channels, the devs and operations staff at the Archive are working like gangbusters every day to shore up technology, build out new capacity, and get through another 24 hours of uptime in reaction to the onslaught that we're now getting.

It's great.

Unfortunately, the nature of Operations is that the public facing aspect of Operations has precisely two settings: "WHAT HAPPENED" and "WHO CARES". That's a shame because there's a lot of moving parts and projects right now and there's a lot to keep spinning.

All this to say, this would be a great year to jump up donations to the Archive. We're not going to have our October Event (but we are doing a funding drive) and it's actually critically important we keep things going in the face of all that's happening.

https://archive.org/donate 

Say Hi to Jason if you donate. It amuses me when it comes across the donator comments channel (which we all read when we have time, and appreciate every note).

Again. https://archive.org/donate  - we take everything except seashells and day-old donuts.