Farcaster archiving

[vrypan]

The way forecaster is designed, we know that hubs will purge at least some casts and reactions at some point in time.

This means casts must be considered ephemeral: Something you cast or react to today may not not be available in 3 or 4 years.

I personally find value in long term preservation of digital info, and there are a number of important use cases where I think I'm not alone: archives of politicians, organisations, and public figure statements, project announcements, reactions to historic posts. Even at a smaller scale, if fc becomes the basis of social interactions of web3 (for example, using FIP-2), I'm sure many users would like to know their options about retaining content that is not their own, but are of interest to them (such as a blog post's comments and likes).

I'm not sure what the right answer is, and maybe there are more than one. Maybe it's some change at the protocol level, maybe it's special clients or apps, maybe it's something else. Maybe fc has to be ephemeral, and that's it.

I post this here, to open the discussion.