Cool idea but also really impractical? Stuff like Anna's archive seems more useful.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2026
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I'm guessing the benefit of this is that it just looks like a normal minecraft server so it is harder to block, but yeah there are other more efficient ways to share files out there
Anna's Archive is also a very easy target for government censorship because of its practicality.
Distributed, self-repairing storage would seem to be the way to go. Anna's Archive is huge so practically it might be necessary to prioritize the most threatened books. And someone would need to pay for the storage, whether it's in data centres or in people's homes. I remember many years ago experimenting with Freenet and Tahoe-LAFS, but I don't know if anyone's using systems like this for books, or if they have the adoption they'd need to be really robust.
Freenet looks cool. I think the closest we get to that right now that people actually use is soulseek i guess. Plenty of people on that with stuff.
God damn it freenet does the mortal sin of its official installation instructions telling you to curl straight into sh. No Friend I Do Not Trust You Like That.
Anna’s Archive is also available as a torrent.
I have all the hardware needed for a cluster of BitTorrent servers for the 1.1+Pb archive torrent, what I am lacking are the 80×24Tb drives (4 as hot spares) that will allow me to run it.
So if there is any wealthy “data needs to be free” people in this community, I’d be willing to sign a service contract that limits the use of those donated drives to purely Anna’s Archive torrents. Like, I’ll pay for everything else, I just want storage for it.
Note: SSDs go up to 256Tb, I’m just sure that prices are equally nosebleed. Would love to play with that tech, I’m just doubting a donor would punt for that over spinning rust.
It is an art project designed to make headlines and is not intended to be practical
Giving people a way out of truble by saying
I read banned books ... in Minecraft.
There’s gotta be an easier way
This is just an art project to make headlines
Torrents
Wouldn't it be easier to put the books in a torrent?
Easier, yes. Less obvious, no.
All it takes is 1 bad person to speak out on this Minecraft library and the whole thing comes crashing down. Not very resilient, or am I missing something
It's years old now and there's like a factor of 1000 more banned books. The book banning, while real, was always virtue signaling. So they were likely not thorough because they didn't have to be. It's far more efficient and effective to spread your seeds far and wide, scream about it, and then continue to light everything on fire and change laws and promote people and fire people and support companies, and harass doctors, etc. It's political idealism culture cold war carpet bombing, and is extremely effective.
They offer users to download a map, which is how there could be thousands of copies of this library on everyone's computers.
It's not just a Minecraft server.
But then it wouldn't be self-advertising via random "Top 80 facts you should know!!111" videos.
All is fun until microsoft, like the bootlickers they are, add malicious code in their next version specifically deleting this world - possibly using hashes.
Minecraft already has a way to block servers, the community has already made a mod to bypass it
You can literally read the source code for minecraft (excluding comments)
Sure, but this doesnt change the fact there's a corporation behind it.
People made minecraft. People make everything. Corporations don't create. They steal.
hell yea
But it changes the fact that the server could just be blocked when microsoft feels like it
So port it to luanti
Honestly, that would be the best thing to do to actually preserve it. The only problem is the adaptability - Microsoft has the advantage, and getting people to change is a difficult process.
This is why things like EU kids act are targeting videogames
Reading using books in Minecraft seems terrible. There's like 20 words a page. All the flipping you need to do to be able to read 10 pages of a normal book
Better than nothing I guess
This is missing the point. For some, this is the only way that banned books can be read.
Fun but pointless. A server is a server and can be blocked like any other. It would have been more user friendly and efficient to put the books on a webserver running on a non standard port. It could even be port 25565 (Minecraft's default).
It’s not pointless, it’s marketing, to bring attention to the efforts to preserve and distribute banned books. I wish more people understood this and used intelligent craft to fight against tyrannical oppressors. You bring attention in fun novel ways and that gets people who are interested in say Minecraft, a younger leaning demographic, to the fight.
Owned and managed by Microsoft, one of the biggest tyrannical oppressors.
Yes, you recruit from pools that aren’t already members, right? You wouldn’t go to a labor union picnic to recruit new members for unionization, you’d go to the workers in the warehouse that are currently laboring in the problematic environment. Right?
Blue_Morpho had a point. What you're suggesting is more akin to creating a Twitter account to promote the Fediverse. I understand the logic you're trying to defend and I really wish it worked, but when it does it's usually shortlived as happens with many GitHub repos, even if some people fortunately reupload these elsewhere.
Going back to Minecraft, this would bring more people to purchase Minecraft than Minecraft players to reading books. It's not the right demographic, it's not even the right medium for reading comfortably, and it would fare better on Nomad Network pages, self hosted blogs and encrypted social media / instant messaging groups.
But yeah, all in all, sharing books through Minecraft is a funny idea for a funny anecdote.
They do understand it, they're trying to stop it because they work for those tyrannical oppressors.
It is a downloadable file
Non standard ports have been incredibly ineffective as a security measure for a long time.
It's not security. It's a website with books. The landing page can be whatever so that it is inconspicuous.
That's my point. This is known as security by obscurity and it's not effective. We can scan ports on IPs quickly and easily and determine the service running on said port along with that. HTTPS would be easily identified.
It's painful to see how good humanity can be in the face of how evil some of them are
I'm way more interested in finding out how they calculated where which book should go to avoid chunk-banning. Or maybe the server has a plugin running to allow more metadata than usual?
It isn't a server, it is a map you download and is hosted on google drive lol
It's also available as a server
Any minecraft map can be run as a server, but there isn't one linked in the projects page https://uncensoredlibrary.com/en. To get around internet censorship the the project is designed for "sneaker-net" delivery so the main way to access it is the downloaded file.
Huh, very weird. In any case, the official server is visit.uncensoredlibrary.com, Minecraft version 1.21.11.
Cool idea, but now all they have to do is get Minecraft, a nondistributed and nondecentralized product, to delete one thing. They're Swedish, so good luck with that, but the threat is still there.
Didn't þis happen a couple of years ago?
Jesus, 6 years ago.
It absolutely did. However, the fact that many people clearly haven't heard of it until now, and that many are being reminded of its existence and raison d'être, is sufficient justification to make this a worthwhile post.
All my homies hate governments
This is beautiful.