A bit of a technical tangent, but I wonder if a peer to peer version of this website would increase its chances of survival. I can easily imagine something like a reference manager that puts copies of the PDFs you've read or written on IPFS. It would still require some central node that coordinates the sharing, but if some open source ActivityPub service would fill that role it could work I think. Provided there is of course enough personal incentive to share and keep sharing these works.
There's been an ongoing effort for a bit over a year now to make sure the torrents from sci-hub's archive are sufficiently well seeded (specifically, the scimag collection from library genesis, available at libgen.rs). It's about 80TB total, so with current hard drive prices you can maintain your own local copy of all 85 million articles for under $2k. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any tools to usefully browse the collection like what you suggested but it would be great to see something like that.
The main library genesis book collection is already available via IPFS (see freeread.org), so I wouldn't be surprised to see all the sci-hub articles available similarly at some point.
What I find more amazing about libgen is that even non-IPFS users can still get access through the Cloudflare gateway. Years ago it was a slow dodgy process through regular http channels.
Hats off to them for fighting the good fight here. IPFS has a bright future and I have massive respect for these large companies that get behind it.
