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AMAZONS at the Moonspeaker |
ALMOST LOST FEMINIST SOURCES In the course of my years of perambulations around the world wide web and other computer-hosted resources accessible via the internet, I have sadly observed the replication of the firmspace practice of disappearing Feminist resources of all kinds, usually within barely a year of their original posting. By Feminist, I mean real Feminist, materials that reflect and support the practical, political, and social goal of women's and girls' liberation. Feminist is not for everyone, it is for female human beings. It is not for men or boys of any kind, healthy, pornsick, or otherwise. Women in general and Feminists in particular have long had to resort to relatively ephemeral media to store and share their knowledge, especially after men took such extraordinary efforts to cut intergenerational connections between mothers and daughters. However, the fact that men have tried extraordinary measures and still have not actually succeeded should be profoundly encouraging. One of the many methods of sharing and preserving women's knowledge at least long enough to ensure it is shared and preserved in another way is of course, the web pages and websites of the world wide web. The world wide web is moribund right now, and even genuinely well-intentioned and well-designed in terms of technology projects like the internet archive are not as dependable as they should be. The sad fact is that the internet archive readily deletes web pages and other resources whenever influential political entities masquerading as "law enforcement" demand it. That means that as always, it is up to women and girls to preserve and carry out the work of platform moves and medium shifts to keep our records preserved and available. This page is a modest contribution to that ongoing effort.
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How to Find and Preserve Such Gems Over time the sad fact is that the major search engines are little more than skins over an algorithm devoted to propaganda above all else. They are mainly owned by so-called technology or advertising corporations, and of those most are thoroughly undermined by both corporate and military money. Trying to find and use honest, privacy-respecting search engines at the moment is difficult. For now I have found that when trying to track down references and specific search terms, my best luck tends to be based on combining searches in the internet archive and the u.k.-based mojeek. Please note that the internet archive is not privacy respecting, especially if you allow all javascript it may load to run. It uses google code and hosted services for all types of sign in and account creation, so personally I only use it without signing in. Mojeek works fully without javascript, including its image search, although you can enable javascript for it to make things a little fancier. It maintains its own indexes and servers, and since it has not existed as long as google these indexes are not as large. Nevertheless, mojeek's algorithm is of far better quality, and has a particular knack for catching useful results from the internet archive. So when the internet archive's own self-hosted elastisearch instance performs abominably, mojeek comes to the rescue. That said, there is an important caveat on mojeek, and that is as far as I can tell there is no means to filter out pornography whatsoever. So search results can be thoroughly polluted for terms that are too obviously related to women, including such ordinary and common misspellings as "aunty." The mojeek owners seem proud of their refusal to provide ready means to knock at least the worst pornography results out which may be turned on and off by the person searching. It could be based simply on blocking the obvious domains, and much of the time that would be sufficient – and of course, leave it to the people using the search engine to apply the filter or not. Many people recommend archiving weblinked resources in the internet archive's wayback machine or on the archive.is site. Censorship problems at the internet archive and contested evidence of reporting to "intelligence agencies" by archive.is makes them unable to stand alone, but they can be excellent contributors to a preservation plan. It is important for women to also archive copies on their own webpages and websites as well as offline when it is possible and legally safe for them to do so. |
Copyright © C. Osborne 2023
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