Why Wayback, why IPFS

What does Persistwise do?

Persistwise watches your RSS feeds and archives each new post the moment it appears. You keep writing on Hey, Substack, your own site, a newsletter, or a social feed.

Why the Wayback Machine?

The Wayback Machine holds a public, citable snapshot at archive.org that anyone can open without us. It is independent of Persistwise. Save Page Now 2 lets us archive a post as it appears, not whenever a crawler happens by.

Why IPFS?

IPFS stores a content-addressed copy. The CID is the file. We pin through Pinata onto the public network so the HTML can be fetched from more than one gateway. Links use dweb.link. IPFS complements the Wayback Machine. It does not replace it.

Why also keep a local copy?

The local copy is the one we own on disk. It is the source of truth if a third party is slow or down. Later print PDFs will come from this, not from a live site.

Why not Archive.today?

Archive.today has no official API and is CAPTCHA-heavy. That is the wrong shape for a quiet RSS job that runs every 15 minutes.

Why not Perma.cc?

Perma.cc is built for academic and legal citations, not a daily writer pipeline.

Why not Ghostarchive or Common Crawl?

Ghostarchive is not a backend we can drive per post. Common Crawl is a bulk web crawl, not archive-on-publish.

Why not web3.storage or Storacha?

Those services have gateway shutdown risk. That is the failure mode this product exists to avoid.

Why not run our own IPFS node?

Running a node is an ops burden that does not fit Keep at $40/year. Pinata pins. We are not running a node.

Why not Arweave yet?

Pay-once permanence is interesting later. It is not the MVP layer.

How is this different from Authory or a portfolio backup?

Authory is a showcase and a private backup of your clippings. Persistwise does not host your blog or build a portfolio. It leaves a public Wayback snapshot and an IPFS pin for each post, plus a local copy.

Why not a WordPress Wayback plugin?

Those only work if you publish on WordPress. Persistwise follows RSS wherever you already write.

How much is Keep?

Keep is $40/year. There is no free tier except the operator.