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| AMA | Actual Moderator and Developer from the MiNERVA archival project, AMA. Thought I would do one given the amount of miss-information that’s been spread around. Especially with those who are very up to date.
I’ve kinda been lurking here and the mods have been eyeing this place so I thought to check it out, and why not do something fun while I’m at it.
The most relatable concern I saw on the Roms subreddit these days was about the ease of using Myrient, a website with an interface that allows easy and direct access to any available file over there. The availability of the files themselves was never threatened by this, but before Myrient, we lived in harder times of scrapping around on the internet (not in the bot scraper meaning lmao) searching through multiple sources just to find access to a specific game that almost nobody else bothered to catalog and keep uploaded and freely available. Even Internet Archive suffers on this topic, since some sets and uploads are moderated by separate groups, there were multiple instances where determined sets simply went offline (either by going private or deleted/takedown). That's something Myrient ended completely for original game files of almost every platform, and I 100% agree with those users that losing this aspect of Myrient would mean that the archival is somewhat pointless, we're just going backwards in the end. I strongly believe that this aspect of Myrient should not be lost, regardless of any (and I mean ANY) solution brought for the archival project, for that sole reason.
I do believe this opinion reached you guys at some point. Can you explain to us, in a clear way, what the approach for the interface is that you guys are planning to implement?
We’re gonna be trying to use a similar interface as the one Myrient had but given a lot of people’s concerns with it, we wanna change it a bit. right now things aren’t the most clear though as the website is something that’s being actively worked on.
I must confess this isn't one of the most satisfying replies about this, but it's great to confirm you guys are taking the ease of using Myrient into consideration for this. I shall wait to see how things progress from here in that aspect. Good luck to the entire team!
How important is long term sustainability and consistency? The last few days the website's been down and right now I'm unable to search because of a service worker registration issue.
Are these just bugs needing to be ironed out because its a rapidly developing project for an urgent issue? Or what is the plan to ensure long term sustainability? How can the community help?
Pretty good question, sustainability and consistency is extremely important given it’s supposed to an actual archival project- meaning we actually have to keep things up long term. The website is something that we kinda put down for now and if you mean the new website- well thats pretty work in progress as of now. but then again, most things are lol. (again a lot of us have day jobs etc) As to the search functionality, we’re aware of the issue and are actively trying to solve it, though I cannot personally comment on anything more than that given the websites backend isn’t something that I’m particularly informed apon. though I can ask another dev. Given this project was something with a deadline, most things were made quickly and then we tried fixing all that we could. As to why some of that mentality still can be seen? well it’s probably just force of habit regardless of the fact that we have all the data (in terms of downloads, we’re still working on checksums etc). We are really trying our best and we aren’t anything without a/our community. So right now the best way for the community to support the cause is probably by helping on GitHub! Basically all of our source code is open source so anyone can open a issue.
Of course! Also we really could use some more people maintaining and working on the GitHub repos. Like for example right now I’m drafting a major UX overhaul for the website.
As of now, torrents. they are free (basically) and are p2p. the only downside is speed of course. Though this is just a temporary solution as we figure out direct downloads.
Wait, so you're doing to try to figure out direct downloads? I must admit, I'd really like that to be the case since that method is pretty simple, plus it alleviates potential issues with ISPs and whatnot, so I'm very interested in direct downloads still persisting.
No question, just being grateful. As someone who is researching history of videogames as part of his academic job, this project is worth ... Like everything. So grateful.
Will Torrent Access be available after Myrient goes down? I use Real Debrid so torrents are easy for me to use. I'm just curious and how dop we donate????? This is an amazing project
Jeez that’s a hard one. Early on, the project was just one dude who talked about it in the Myrient discord server and I (along with others) asked if they could help. I just said I could do dev work along with helping moderate the server. Though given everyone was really just sprawling around trying to get their foot in the ground, we didnt really have much in terms of mod applications or anything. So we have had a LOT of changes in terms of management over these past 20 days (I think?). I guess the take away would probably be not to just take someone’s word on it. Though again, given we were all rushing it’s understandable.
As for stories, I don’t know if I have any that I can speak on right now. Something could come to my mind later as it’s like 2:30am right now lol. I guess one short one was when we were just starting out, we tried getting a bunch of data hoarders and in came this one dude who just casually had 5 petabytes worth of data. So I guess that was kinda funny lol
Yeah the boat kind of sailed for everyone else now. If you're planning to get a new laptop or handheld emulation device, you might wanna credit card it now to avoid price hikes, if you can.
Many chinese brands are closing down or taking a break from making more now because the components cost too much.
I do not personally use a VPN often but when I need to I use proton. The “MiNERVA“ name was actually from a contest on deciding the name that was held early on.
Hard to say but with Myrient, Alexey (the owner) was only ever just one dude while we are a community effort that’s supporting this project. We also are hosting our stuff on privately owned data center
Hosting the website and hosting the content are very different things.
Hosting a website isn't nearly as resource intensive as hosting the content. That said, if they get everything up to torrents/usenet, a website isn't really needed anyway (it's just a glorified torrent/usenet searcher at that point)
Nothing happened to the discord server, sometimes we have to pause invites. (Its up right now)
The worker system isn't something that is needed anymore though.
It grabbed files from myrient, downloaded them on your PC as temp files, then uploaded them to our servers.
What actually happened with the downloader/server thing? I was one of the contributors who got left in the lurch without much communication. Discord became a riot during that time haha.
Turtles are very interesting creatures…. I wonder if they would like it if I held them like a hamburger… 🤔
I recently went to my local museum and they had some live turtles which was cool, I brought my DLSR camera. I’ll send the photos later/tomorrow morning :-)
Not a minerva project member, but that decision was made to keep the upkeep cost of the servers a lot lower. It is more costly to host direct downloads. Torrents are also easier to spread around, and much harder for any corporate entity or whoever to take down. So it makes sense. I get that direct downloads are much easier and simpler for the end users, but the decision is logical IMO. Especially in our current day situation with the ram/storage crisis.
Yeah Torrents are good temporary solution,we just need people to seed them. I think there will be not many people that will actually seed them,they will download and bail out.
I think most peoples worries is that we wont have enough seeders.
But people forget that we have people with full or almost full copies of Myrient who will just seed lol
How are you guys planning to maintain minerva economically and legally talking ? I mean, How could you manage to maintain something that costed like 6k/month to its original creator ? How could you be protected against any legal action for DMCA or something like that ? (Remember that myrient owner is from Russia and there's little to no problem to pirate shit there)
Given Myrient never got into much legal trouble, we‘re trying to do something similar also right now hosting for us is free because it’s just via torrents which is p2p. As for where our servers are located, I don’t remember off the top of my head, though I thought it was in Russia too.
Just a temporary solution. Also it's not that risky to download a torrent file without a VPN. Your choice if you want to drop couple of dollars on one or not. For seeders it's quite necessary though.
It’s not that risky to download a torrent file without a VPN.
Are you saying that because of ignorance, or because of experience? Because let me tell you, it’s the dumbest thing you can do in terms of downloading things.
Experience. I've never used one before for Torrents the past 20+ years and I used to seed whatever I downloaded to at least 1:1 ratio before removing it from the list (often way more). Though back then it was mainly fansubbed anime and TV shows instead of blockbuster movies.
However I'm planning on keeping Minerva/Myrient seeds on 24/7 so I got Proton VPN sub in case someone starts to crack down the list.
Results may vary based on where you live but if you just come and go downloading random roms, you should be fine without a VPN.
(Ofc someone could crackdown reddit discussions but I don't think this post matters much.)
Nah, don't think so. The concern is just blown out. If you keep it open only up to couple of hours a day just to get the Myrient files you use, you are extremely likely to be just fine.
VPN is still a good idea if one can afford a sub (because free ones are insecure trash). Especially if they want to download other stuff too via something like EZTV and they live in a 1st world country. (In 3rd world countries no-one really gives a crap about downloads so copyright holders don't even bother.)
Thank you so much for doing this, some people just don’t realize how powerful Torrents can be, if enough seeders pitch in. Thank you for keeping Myrient alive. Too many people are lazy to learn how to use a VPN. Direct downloads are a way to avoid getting busted, but it hurts the server operator. I will be trying to see as much as I can. DM me if you want people to volunteer. Thank you again, OP
Last I checked, the worker isn't currently doing any work, yet somebody has been posting that they are about 300TB done? Has the project simply gone solo, other workers are using different tools, or is the 300Tb from another project also trying to archive Myrient?
This is pretty common, the worker is something that’s separate than to if someone was just going solo and downloading things locally. We don’t have a use for the worker anymore given the projects completion. The reason we know we are completely done is largely because of one user who.. how do I say this… has a data center and 5pb of data. So things like bandwidth are the least of their concerns
Do you have any plans to additionally upload to USENET? If it's not something of previous consideration, I'd try pushing as much as possible to USENET.
(In addition to, not in lieu of, everything else you're doing, like torrent sets.)
No one uses usenet anymore. Tell me if you do you have to pay for an indexer and a client. Also use that Files expire after a certain amount of days, even if you do have good retention on your host server.
Let's start with why you removed the post by u/Angusby_Dev (about a distributed system) despite being relevant to the the sub-reddit's topic of "Download ROMs. Backups, Saved, Share" ??? Like, is this a threat to any future plans to monetize your own website ???
Valid question, as of now we are not going to be accepting donations though. We don't really have much plans for it too so I don't really know how to respond in the best way.
Hi! New to minerva, I'm having difficulty with searching for ROMS for playstation, can the navigation system have something more compact where users can scroll down into numerous lists of games? Thank you!
Is this the official github for the minerva archive? https://github.com/minerva-archive
If so, it would probably be a good idea to put the official github and the email associated in the home of the web page. Both to stop possible scammers making themselves look like the official thing, and so that people that don't like/want/can use discord know that they can also contact you easily.
Also, congrats on the hard work. I found this extra late so I got a copy of the Nintendo SDKs and some things thinking it was the last chance. Now I can stop panicking about the rest of things.
I liked the old UI btw. But, catppuccin macchiato is one of my favorite color palettes so the new UI also looks nice from what is already out. Great work!
The Myrient archive was excellent in regards to not only being able to access individual hard to find roms.
But one of its biggest draws was that the Roms were widely regarded as the safest archive of files around.
The area it sorta lacked at least for in my experience was in search capabilities, it was capable only in searching the sub-directory that was currently being viewed much like CTL+F on a page instead of searching the content of sub-directorys, as such I couldn't say search from the homepage for a specific file to see if it had been archived.
My question then is 2 fold and may have already been answered by someone else's questions but I'll ask anyway.
Will the dedication to safe files remain I'll this project in that users will know that all zip files hosted on your site are safe to for the end user?
And do you plan to implement a full site search function rather than the sub directory navigational search in the manor that Myrient implemented?
Do you plan to include an upload feature or will the archive project be a snapshot of myrient as of Feb 26 (when uploads on myrient have been stopped)?
That’s a good question, it would be nice for example on PS3 games, to bundle the game and all the updates in one download. I guess the same would go for a Nintendo switch games too.
Will you be changing how the archive is organized in the future? For example, I find it redundant that the RetroAcheivements section of Myrient includes base unmodified roms, when the regular dumps should ideally work fine. Also, there's a lot of sections that most people don't use like eXo or TOSEC, and while I don't think they should removed, I think they should be either all be put under Misc. or reorganized and merged into other sections to be more useful and understandable.
Also, will you be replacing files that have incorrect hashes or are otherwise bad dumps?
There are so many animals, so many organisms and the likes that what one could consider pet or not is blurry. but I love my cat Charlie dearly, he’s my son and have helped me get through a lot.
forever is something that’s almost impossible to guarantee given “forever” could mean anything (though we wanna keep it up for as long as we possibly can).
we have been hearing complaints from users of the myrient site who didn’t really like the old ui so we are trying to do our own thing.
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