A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.
So a lot of speculation and we don’t know much except 2 paragraphs in the FAQ… I’d like to mention though, they’ve recently stripped the Pixel devices of their status as developer devices and now push for their emulator for development. Once they follow that kind of logic, there isn’t really a reason to keep ADB working as is, at least not on real devices.
I think the subscribers count is fairly inaccurate. According to active users per week, it’s number 34. And that’d align with my experience here. Other numbers include lots of nominal members who left Lemmy a long time ago. That mainly shows the Piracy community has had a bad time on Reddit and they were one of the larger coordinated efforts to switch platforms.
I am graduating […]
Sorry, I read that after I replied and edited my comment, but a bit too late… That changes some things…
I agree. There’s roughly two options. Either a static archive as your heritage. Or some writable file storage which can be kept up to date. And yeah, that needs payment, maintenance…
And from my observation, finding people willing to maintain something, or clean up after someone did some annoying things or filled up storage or whatever, is harder than setting up the technology.
Obviously that option would be preferable, though.
[…] or set something local, but set it behind some proxy
Maybe Cloudflare is your friend. They dominate the market of free reverse proxies / tunnels.
But I’m really unsure if I have any good recommendation that fits your situation. Ideally find a successor, next best thing is a Nextcloud, Google Drive, OneDrive or some of the other ones. And if that can’t be done, split it into manageable chunks by course and dump it to some one click hoster or archive.org. That’s all I can come up with.
And by the way, I did appreciate such archives and made use of them. And there’s a lot of reasons (cheating aside) to share notes, PDFs, try old exams to prepare…
The main issue is, you graduate as well and life will move on for you. You might move far away, get a full-time job, maybe have new hobbies or a family and time will come and you’ll stop supporting it as well. I’ve seen that all the time and most privately run things vanish sooner than later.
Of course the entities have to abide by the rules. We also did that… officially… It just happened to be the case that some of the same individuals also did other things after hours, and not in their role as members of the entity… And while mingling you’d find similar-minded people and/or successors for the inofficial operations. It’s a bit trick to get it right. The official entity of course denies any involvement, they can’t take any blame.
And I’d say if you’re the main/sole contributor of content, it’s questionable if this even survives long term. Unless people upload recent exams and material, the content will become obsolete after a few years. Professors will have changed the questions and assignments or the entire course is done by a new professor and the archive will slowly become obsolete. So you kind of need some community anyways. Or skip the hassle and just upload the thing to archive.org or some one click hoster.
Another option would be to talk to the dev club. Maybe they’d like to revamp their solution and take yours, or they have some idea about tech infrastructure.
Seems things have gotten more complicated in the age of cloud computing. I think these archives have always been a thing. In the good old days sometimes on their infrastructure, buried several layers deep in some windows network share or on some specific computer in the computer lab or maintained by the student body of a faculty… And there was always some secret file stash somewhere.
If you’re concerned with a long-term solution. Are there any entities run by the students? Associations or clubs interested in maintaining such a thing long-term? I mean technology aside, the real issue is that this is done by random individuals and they’re gone after a while. Ideally this is done with some help of an entity that lasts longer than that and passed down to future generations.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Or just the average sense of impending doom?