ARCHIVISM
Year:2026

A few years back, I started on a quest to build my own personal Internet.

I had listened to a podcast where someone had expressed a wish for devices with more storage space, 4 TB was the number they threw out, stating that with that much local storage, connecting to the Internet would rarely be neccesary. Using something like Offpunk (https://offpunk.net/ a cli browser that makes local copies of sites visited and scans for updates when connected, and also a built in rss reader), they would essentially be storing their corner of the Internet locally, be able to browse and research and play offline.

With my penchant for SSB and other offline-first protocols and projects, this struck a cord. I played around with Offpunk, but the Internet stuff I was trying to replace was Youtube and Netflix and Tumblr, so it wasn't the right fit.

I figured I'd just start with archiving all the things I found worthwile to keep, and would find a way to organize it later. Yt-dlp got all the Youtube stuff, purchasing secondhand DVDs and ripping with MakeMKV (https://www.makemkv.com/), then processing with Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr/) got Netflix taken care of, and thankfully, Tumblr allowed for a full download of my blog, with 10 years worth of posting, amounting to over 7 GB of images and text.

Over the last few years I've amassed over 330 GB of movies, tv shows, music videos, tutorial videos, radio shows, music, archives of websites, ebooks, and some other random stuff. I've kept every file as small as possible to get quantity over quality (except for music).

For storing and backup, I try to look at this entire archive as an offline cloud: I have it on every device I use. Work laptop, home gaming rig, my phone, and the spare laptop. On top of that I do 2 monthly backups on different drives at different locations which are kept completely offline when not activetly backing up. To keep everything synced I used to use Syncthing, but eventually went back to a good ol' flash drive and FreeFileSync (https://freefilesync.org/) for better control.

For making use of these files, along the way I got Jellyfin (https://jellyfin.org/) up and running to organize and play the movies and tv shows and music (tried to get it to work with the radio shows, but haven't figured that out yet).  I've recently been playing with Veilamp (https://veilamp.com/) for organizing and playing music. For ebooks I've been using Liseur (https://f-droid.org/packages/com.chmouel.liseur/) on my e/os phone for a bit, and it works great.

But there's the problem, I don't have a nice way to organize and search and view pictures and websites and text. I use Obsidian for my notes, so I've thought about also using it to make a personal wiki for all that stuff, but I'm concerned 10's of GB worth of data in a single vault would be un-ideal, and not really what it's made for.

With that idea discarded, the one I'm currently exploring, is useing a static site generator, and basically making my own html cataloge of all this stuff. The sites I've backed up as html docs could be easily connected, I could organize images in pages, and txt docs could also be linked directly.

Only downside I'm seeing is the amount of time that's going to have to be invested at the start, and adding stuff to it in the future might be a pain. And decent search would still be beyond my capabilities.

So I'm throwing this out to anyone who's reading this: any ideas of how to organize and view this stuff better?

I was recently inspired by The Wrew's blog post about building a data lake (https://wrewtopia.com/read/2026-10-31), and while it's well beyond my capabilities to do anything similar, made my realize I might not be using the correct terms to search for an already built solution. I basically want Jellyfin for websites and images and txt files. Just don't know how to make it happen other than using my rudimentary html skills.

In conclusion: I am very happy with my archive right now, have acquired a good chunk of what I want on it, and have figured out how to organize and view most of it, except for webistes, images, and txt files.

PS: if you do want to get in contact with me, Fediverse and SSB are the best bets right now, haven't checked my Hushline in ages.

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