How reliable is the Internet Archive really with us trusting it to store all this valuable information?
i don't think it's reliable at all. Not unless you are using their paid services. For example:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/bitcointalk.org
for this forum, they can go DAYS without even doing a single snapshot. and then in a single day they might do 2 or 3 snapshots. doesn't make any sense.
what you'll notice if you take a look at the snapshots of this forum is when you start clicking on individual threads, many of them don't even seem to be archived so it's worthless.
There are times that certain pages simply fail to load in my experience.
you are right. i think the internet archive is almost worthless. but they do have a service called Archive It
https://web.archive.org/web/20230124102045/https://archive-it.org/but no details on how much it costs so i wouldn't really trust them that much. plus i bet it costs a ton.
I really don't know how much all the Bitcointalk data will cost when using all these decentralized file storage systems so no opinion on that
it would cost more than any centralized web hosting service most likely.
; and I don't know the risks/downsides of IPFS either besides the fact that it's far more tried and tested.
using ipfs for a website as dynamic as a forum seems like it could be problematic. ipfs is really best for storing files that don't change. if we think of trying to store each forum thread in it's own file, that file would need to be "updated" possibly hundreds of times. not ideal.