A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. The site, called RestoredCDC.org, went live Tuesday and is currently being hosted in Europe.
As we have been following since the beginning of Trump’s second term, websites across the entire federal government have been altered and taken offline under this administration’s war on science, health, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Critical information promoting vaccines, HIV care, reproductive health options including abortion, and trans and gender confirmation healthcare have been purged from the CDC’s live website under Trump. Disease surveillance data about bird flu and other concerns have either been delayed or have stopped being updated entirely. Some deleted pages across the government have at least temporarily been restored thanks to a court order, but the Trump administration has added a note rejecting “gender ideology” to some of them.
“Our goal is to provide a resource that includes the information and data previously available,” the team wrote. “We are committed to providing the previously available webpages and data, from before the potential tampering occurred. Our approach is to be as transparent as possible about our process. We plan to gather archival data and then remove CDC logos and branding, using GitHub to host our code to create the site.”
Mad levels of respect for these people
Once on the internet, always on the internet.
You data horders are insane. I love it.
we need to get blue state leaders and researchers to start referring data to it and referencing this instead of the official site.
but many website archives are slow to use and difficult to navigate because things like interactive elements and internal linking can sometimes be wonky.
Well, at least httrack does the relinking by itself. And i think wget’s mirror option too?
It’s weird living in a world where people are rescuing our past from the Ministry of Information sponsored Memory Hole.
It’s weird watching Idiocracy become a documentary in real-time. When farmers can’t get fertilizers from Canada, I’m waiting for Trump and Elon to announce a partnership with Gatorade as the new Crop Quencher.
Censoring communications is 1984, not Idiocracy.
We can live in both at the same time.
At least he’ll fix the ecomoney
Didn’t he already fix it? Aren’t we past day one?
Aren’t there also a bunch of govt officials making alts on bluesky to try to somewhat anonymously get info out?
Alt National Park Service comes to mind. They’re doing incredible work
https://source.coop/ Someone put up 16tb of data.gov data here too
I hope California, blue states, and Europe all bankroll this into an official Neo-CDC, free of Yarvin’s hatred and stupidity.
Europe won’t do a thing with these initiatives, at least not in any official manner (what they can do though is to ensure EU web hosters of this stuff aren’t feeling the pressure). They’ve enough to do restructuring their economy and military, all the while also dealing with war and fascism from the east. They won’t risk Trump having another tamper tantrum, at least not before the EU and its allies are widely decoupled from the US economy.
They need to actually go into Ukraine before the US takes a more active Russian stance. He’ll talk a lot, but he doesn’t want a war with the EU. Europe needs to move first.
Data preservationists are beating back the coming dark age. They’re heroes.
And they called us data hoarders!
They’re either beating it back or delaying it. I hope it’s the former, but I fear it’s the latter.
If they screw shit up too much there are already the nerdiest of nerds working on decentralized wireless networks. They’d be slow is heck, but I heard many people prefer web 1.0 over todays’ bloated crap anyway.
I was just thinking earlier today: I really, really hope someone is backing up the Library of Congress’ stuff, particularly Chronicling America, which has almost every newspaper issue (searchable by text and much more) from 1756 - 1963. Like archive.org – federal edition, sort of.
Anyway, given how fascists love to erase history, it’s precisely the kind of thing I could see them targeting. Particularly if you wanted to erase the fact that, oh, I don’t know, your father Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927. That kinda thing.
using GitHub to host our code
I can’t possibly think of any way that could backfire.
Yeah, hosting it outside of US but by a US provider? Wait, how’d they manage that?
Should be fine with the way git works, just inconvenient.
Any maintainers (or someone here) should set up a regular job to git pull the repo every night.
Microsoft suddenly getting ordered by the DoJ to pull offending projects from github Or Else.
if that happens, people should migrate to gitlab or forgejo. gitlab is a Ukrainian company, and forgejo development is primarily driven by Codeberg in Germany.
people should just automatically push to all three as a backup from the start, tbh
They don’t need to, because git is already decentralized. All the history is usually on everyone’s computers.
it’s not the history though it’s the releases, readmes, or issues for people who are interested in the project but aren’t contributors
It’s not just about git. It’s also about issued, PRs, comments, security advisory, and so on
Gitlab was created by a ukranian and dutch developer originally but today Gitlab stock is traded on Nasdaq and its HQ is listed as San Francisco (wikipedia). I use it selfhosted but I don’t think gitlab.com can be seen as European anymore.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
I self host forgejo. GitHub is the better service because of their super fast ci servers, the GitHub actions that just work, and also because collaboration is tied to the network effect
Dammit really need to stop setting up HQs in US. It’s the same for archive.org and wikipedia.
I think you might be right for the simple reason that (based on that same source and my presumption of their names ) all the C* people seem to be American as well.
if that happens, people should migrate
Or better yet, they should just go ahead and do so right now. What’s the point of picking Github over the other better alternatives anyway?
(i agree entirely, but i have to accept a lot of people just go wherever the most users are)
It’s a version control system, not social media!
I get that you’re explaining it, not endorsing it, and so this criticism isn’t directed at you, but the notion that people would pick Github over Gitlab or Codeburg because of the bandwagon effect is just dumb and weird.
I agree and also don’t at the same time. It’s coming from a genuine place of you get more driveby contributions on Github than you do Gitlab or Codeberg, but at the same time, people will ultimately go where the projects are, and I think the more open source code we host on Codeberg the more users we’ll get on Codeberg, and the more Codeberg users we get the more driveby contributions projects will get on Codeberg. Like I get where an individual project is coming from preferring Github over Codeberg, BUT where we are currently where everyone is preferring Github over codeberg is ultimately just us strangling ourselves. I think when Microsoft bought GitHub and a lot of projects moved to Codeberg, and then again when Microsoft started pushing Copilot hard… IDK, I guess what I’m getting at is WHAT IS THE HOLD UP PEOPLE! Move your projects to Codeberg! And when you’re looking for solutions to problems you’re having, look on Codeberg first. For one thing, it’s actually lowkey nicer to use at this point, and it does have enough traction that you should get enough driveby contributions to be worth your while
I find it weird that one can sign in to codeberg with a github account.
Any opinions on gitea? Idk I’ve been using it for about a year and it works nicely
of the gogs family tree it’s my middle favorite.
- forgejo
- gitea
- gogs
forgejo gets the edge because of federation. gitea’s corporate situation is less than ideal. gogs simply doesn’t have the features to be a complete solution
I didn’t realize Gitea had any issues, I didn’t do my due diligence and look into them much after switching from GitHub.
I’ll check out forgejo thanks!
I had no idea that Gitlab was Ukrainian.
makes sense why it “just fucking works”, unlike github.
Is this like that meme about houseplants and potatoes?
Github - aww, someone called out API too much I guess I’ll just die
Gitlab - I am in a fucking warzone and you don’t see that stopping me.
Didn’t know that. Thanks for the tidbit of lore. :)
You mean a company with deep ties to Elon Musk’s biggest personal enemy Sam Altman?
No way. I’m sure it will be fine, just like the CDC website
Good to see people taking “information demands to be free” seriously.
Hosting in Europe is the Cherry on top.
Can this be made into a .zim for Kiwix?
