Applefritter's 100-Year Plan

2020 is Applefritter's 21st anniversary. Over the past year, I've been exploring options such as non-profit status or affiliating with other organizations, to ensure Applefritter's continued existence.

The primary benefit I see in joining a non-profit would be having a board formally committed to preserving the site. In other ways, being part of a larger, established legal entity could endanger Applefritter's future.  As I write this, a third of U.S. museums are facing the possibility of permanent closure.

Applefritter's smallness gives us a lot of options. In 1999, Applefritter was hosted on a prototype Apple Network Server 300 (Deep Dish) at Rackhenge Networks. Today it's on an inexpensive Linode VPS. As costs continue to decrease, it's become possible for a single person to keep this website running indefinitely, without the support of an institution.

I believe Applefritter would benefit from a group of people committed to preserving it, but not from becoming a legal entity. I have established a three-member group to preserve the site: myself in the United States, ex-parrot in New Zealand, and a third, anonymous member in Europe, who will be known by the code name Deep Dish.

All three of us maintain backups of Applefritter. If something happens to me, ex-parrot will take over running the website and will appoint a new member to replace me. Likewise, if ex-parrot or Deep Dish become unable to continue in their roles, I will appoint somebody to replace them.

No later than 2050, successors will be appointed for each member. If the age of those successors is around 30, that should take us to about 2100, which will be Applefritter's 101st anniversary.

We've taken measures to help ensure Applefritter, its community, and its historical archives can survive in varying political climates.

Ex-parrot has registered an alternative domain name for Applefritter: applefritter.nz. Right now, it just redirects to the live site. If it should become impossible for us to continue using the .com domain name, this site will move to .nz. I have no direct access to the .nz domain.

We've also set up an onion service, which can be accessed via the Tor Browser, in case we're unable to use DNS or wish to obscure the location of the server: deepdish54vurjw4.onion. The onion service is mostly functional, but with a few quirks that we'll be working out over the next few months.

Deep Dish has generated another address, deepdish4k62u3n3.onion. Deep Dish alone has access to the private key file for this address.

Any messages from Deep Dish will be signed with this key:

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Please consider saving a local copy of this key and the onion addresses.

Applefritter's 1,000-Year Plan

We may make some changes to this formula, to stagger the age of members, to change their number, or to give another member anonymity.

Once we get past the first hundred years, I think the uniqueness of a hundred-year-old website run by a semi-secret society will help sustain Applefritter's future.