ArchiveBox is great.
I’m big into retro computing and general old electronics shit, and I archive everything I come across that’s useful.
I just assume anything and everything on some old dude’s blog about a 30 year old whatever is subject to vanishing at any moment, and if it was useful once, it’ll be useful again later probably so fuck it, make a copy of everything.
Not like storage is expensive, anyway.
Not really: if you’re astroturfing, you don’t do all your astroturfing from a single source because that makes it so obvious even a blind person could see it and sort it out.
You do it from all over the places, mixed in with as much real user traffic as you can, and then do it steadily and without being hugely bursty from a single location.
Humans are very good at pattern matching and recognition (which is why we’ve not all been eaten by tigers and leopards) and will absolutely spot the single source, or extremely high volume from a single source, or even just the looks-weird-should-investigate-more pattern you’d get from, for example, exactly what happened to cause this post.
TLDR: they’re doing this because they’re trying to evade humans and ML models by spreading the load around, making it not a single source, and also trying to mix it in with places that would also likely have substantial real human traffic because uh, that’s what you do if you’re hoping to not be caught.
It’s both horrible discovery and a limited number of creators.
But, for discoverability, https://sepiasearch.org/ might help you find things to watch, since it’s the only good multi-server search I’ve seen. (And run by the peertube devs.)