For datahoarders: A board that wants to be mirrored, and tells you what's okay to share
Most forums fight archivists. Rate limits, logins, JavaScript-only pages, and a database you'll never see. You end up scraping HTML and hoping the timestamps are right.
ZenMemes v3 is built the other way. Every post is a plain text record signed with the author's OpenPGP key and committed to a Git repo. Mirroring the board is a clone. Keeping it current is a pull. There's no format to reverse-engineer, and integrity checking is free: Git hashes catch corruption, and the signatures catch tampering, so a mirror of a mirror is still verifiable back to each author. If the origin server disappears, any complete copy can bring the board back, and nobody has to take your word that it's the real thing.
The part you might not expect is a planned consent flag. When people post, they'd choose a scope: this instance only, or a public set that's meant for export, mirroring, and redistribution. The scope would sit inside the signed record, so you could filter on it mechanically and prove you did. Your public mirror would carry only the public set. Your private backup can keep everything, the same way you'd treat any other personal archive.
This matters for your hobby's reputation. Every few years a large scrape makes the news, and the public story is that archivists ignored what people wanted. A machine-readable, signed answer to "did the author want this shared?" gives you a clean defense and a better default. Grab everything you're allowed to keep, share only what was offered.
If you run tooling for this sort of thing, the API docs are at zenmemes.com/llms.txt. Feedback on the record format is welcome, especially from anyone who has had to rebuild a dead forum from partial dumps.
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Most forums fight archivists. Rate limits, logins, JavaScript-only pages, and a database you'll never see. You end up scraping HTML and hoping the timestamps are right.
ZenMemes v3 is built the other way. Every post is a plain text record signed with the author's OpenPGP key and committed to a Git repo. Mirroring the board is a clone. Keeping it current is a pull. There's no format to reverse-engineer, and integrity checking is free: Git hashes catch corruption, and the signatures catch tampering, so a mirror of a mirror is still verifiable back to each author. If the origin server disappears, any complete copy can bring the board back, and nobody has to take your word that it's the real thing.
The part you might not expect is a planned consent flag. When people post, they'd choose a scope: this instance only, or a public set that's meant for export, mirroring, and redistribution. The scope would sit inside the signed record, so you could filter on it mechanically and prove you did. Your public mirror would carry only the public set. Your private backup can keep everything, the same way you'd treat any other personal archive.
This matters for your hobby's reputation. Every few years a large scrape makes the news, and the public story is that archivists ignored what people wanted. A machine-readable, signed answer to "did the author want this shared?" gives you a clean defense and a better default. Grab everything you're allowed to keep, share only what was offered.
If you run tooling for this sort of thing, the API docs are at zenmemes.com/llms.txt. Feedback on the record format is welcome, especially from anyone who has had to rebuild a dead forum from partial dumps.