4 ms·

This is very sad, but other than donating to the Internet Archive what can we do? Feels like we'll know more about certain periods of the Byzantine Empire than

This is very sad, but other than donating to the Internet Archive what can we do? Feels like we'll know more about certain periods of the Byzantine Empire than 1996 online culture in the near future.

est31 7y ago
There is also the Archive team: https://archiveteam.org/ https://archiveteam.org/ It's aligned with the Internet Archive in many ways and there is cooperation. They are looking for volunteers! Other than that, if you design/build websites you could probably make sure that they are accessible for the crawlers and that there is technological compatibility. E.g. I've seen Internet Archive have problems with SPAs.
- sascha_sl 7y ago
  They constantly archive things people do not want archived. Like Mastodon.
  - dewey 7y ago
    A lot of the websites that shut down quickly didn't want to get archived too (blocked the Archive etc) and if the archiveteam wouldn't have stepped up it would be lost now. If you don't want things to stick around don't put them online.
    - sascha_sl 7y ago
      Just because you can, doesn't mean you should archive peoples private lives, especially if those already deny robots in general, which many mastodon profiles do. I can understand overriding a corporate decision, but the meta tag on Mastodon profiles is a user preference that is explicitly opt in. There's a lot of harm that can be done with archived data and you idiots never see the issue because you're not targets and you assume anything anyone puts on the internet will be curl'd by someone. But that's because YOU'RE THE ONES DOING IT. STOP.
      - scohesc 7y ago
        Then practice good opsec and post under a pseudonym or something. We're past the point where you should expect any privacy of your identity on the internet.
        jolmg 7y ago
        > We're past the point It never was a point. It was common sense since the old days to never expect privacy from what you publish on the internet. That's what publishing means.
      - tripzilch 7y ago
        Because they are the ones normalising the habit of smearing your personal details all over the net. I mean it seriously, we didn't used to do that. Anonymity, pseudonymity, remember how nobody used to know you're a dog on the Internet? > But that's because YOU'RE THE ONES DOING IT. STOP. No it's because the people who are doing harm using that data are doing harm. And they're not listening.
  - LocalH 7y ago
    If you don't want it archived or kept, then don't publish it
    - sascha_sl 7y ago
      "If you don't want to get shot in the US, don't go into public spaces" has about the same energy.
      - LocalH 7y ago
        I don't see that. So is it your belief that a person should by law, have the right to demand that anything they have ever published be taken down, no matter where it is? So a person has the right to contribute to a community for any given amount of time, and then pull out of that community and remove all their contributions?
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Source? Keep in mind that archiving Mastodon is pretty much inevitable: spin up an instance, connect widely, keep toots. There've been some announced archive projects, one of which flared out loudly a few weeks ago when I asked what the content removal policy was (the operator threatened retaliatory actions just for my asking, I saved their replies ... via the Internet Archive). IA basically have an "ask and we'll remove" policy for content removal. Given that Mastodon toots are parented (at least for source instances) under the user's profile URL, asking for a global removal is fairly straightforward. Email info@archive.org The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is also, at least for now, not very easily searchable. Having been involved in the project to archive Google+, it's 1) impressive at what they saved and 2) disappointing at what was missed, as well as 3) frustratingly difficult to track down specific items. If I've got a link, I can generally get there. If not ... it's much harder. I do think we need to come to some level of agreement/understanding of what can be / should be archived, and what should not. That's not easy. I'm not an archive absolutist (save everything), but I understand the value in saving even the ephemeral and non-obviously significant. Significance often increases in time and context.
    - sascha_sl 7y ago
      IA is fine. Archiveteam, which my comment references, has been doing it against user wishes. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Mastodon https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Mastodon https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=robots.txt https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=robots.txt They're not the same entity, although people often assume they are.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        I'm aware of Archiveteam, and worked with them on the G+ archive project. They've been sensitive to exclusion requests, and serve principally to move data to IA, where, again, removal requests are easy and recognised. IA have generally the same policy as AT on robots.txt, for entirely justifiable reasons. In the grand scheme of things, open, public, accessible archives >>> closed, private, nonaccessible (or accessible-only-for-a-(price|class) archives. Adding the capacity to denote specific exclusions assists further in this.
forgotmypw3 7y ago
Start making your own archive, saving the nicest things you find as .txt, .jpg, and .mp4.
KozmoNau7 7y ago
Conquer your FOMO and accept that not everything has to be permanent. It's okay that stuff is sometimes lost, it hurts a little and then after a little while it doesn't matter. I've lost my digital collections a number of times, and I just start over again. I also regularly delete my old content/comments wherever I can. Personal opinion, obviously.
lm28469 7y ago
It's just life. Society evolved to make everything a matter of "consume and move on to the next thing". Tbh I doubt anyone care about 99.99% of things that have ever been posted on internet, it's juste like paintings, books, movies, music, or any other medium, most of it disappear, some pieces stay forever, the world move on. It's nice to dive in the past from time to time but I don't need a 1:1 archive on 1996 online culture. There is so much low quality content dumped every second you'd be hard pressed to archive everything, youtube alone is hundreds of hours of video uploaded every minute, 24/7/365 for years. Weirdly enough the only pics left from my childhood aren't digital, they're from a 1980s film slr (that I still use to this day).
- kace91 7y ago
  I think this is the real danger, survival of personal data. Digital media is way more vulnerable if you don't know how to take care of it (taking care of physical photos is pretty straightforward in comparison). There's going to be a lot of people ignorant of the fact that media like CDs or even hard drives degrade, that lose their phones and the pictures in it without a backup, etc. whose memories will be wiped away. In my country for example, there used to be a fb clone that was all the rage back when I was a teenager (since fb wasn't translated to our local language yet back then). The company pivoted and its social media site went offline after a few years, and many many people lost memories that were exclusively kept there - I met the CEO in a conference a few months ago and he mentioned that he's off social media entirely because of the amount of people constantly contacting him to get their photos back.

This is very sad, but other than donating to the Internet Archive what can we do? Feels like we'll know more about certain periods of the Byzantine Empire than 1996 online culture in the near future.

est31 7y ago

There is also the Archive team: https://archiveteam.org/ https://archiveteam.org/ It's aligned with the Internet Archive in many ways and there is cooperation. They are looking for volunteers! Other than that, if you design/build websites you could probably make sure that they are accessible for the crawlers and that there is technological compatibility. E.g. I've seen Internet Archive have problems with SPAs.

sascha_sl 7y ago
They constantly archive things people do not want archived. Like Mastodon.
- dewey 7y ago
  A lot of the websites that shut down quickly didn't want to get archived too (blocked the Archive etc) and if the archiveteam wouldn't have stepped up it would be lost now. If you don't want things to stick around don't put them online.
  - sascha_sl 7y ago
    Just because you can, doesn't mean you should archive peoples private lives, especially if those already deny robots in general, which many mastodon profiles do. I can understand overriding a corporate decision, but the meta tag on Mastodon profiles is a user preference that is explicitly opt in. There's a lot of harm that can be done with archived data and you idiots never see the issue because you're not targets and you assume anything anyone puts on the internet will be curl'd by someone. But that's because YOU'RE THE ONES DOING IT. STOP.
    - scohesc 7y ago
      Then practice good opsec and post under a pseudonym or something. We're past the point where you should expect any privacy of your identity on the internet.
      - jolmg 7y ago
        > We're past the point It never was a point. It was common sense since the old days to never expect privacy from what you publish on the internet. That's what publishing means.
    - tripzilch 7y ago
      Because they are the ones normalising the habit of smearing your personal details all over the net. I mean it seriously, we didn't used to do that. Anonymity, pseudonymity, remember how nobody used to know you're a dog on the Internet? > But that's because YOU'RE THE ONES DOING IT. STOP. No it's because the people who are doing harm using that data are doing harm. And they're not listening.
- LocalH 7y ago
  If you don't want it archived or kept, then don't publish it
  - sascha_sl 7y ago
    "If you don't want to get shot in the US, don't go into public spaces" has about the same energy.
    - LocalH 7y ago
      I don't see that. So is it your belief that a person should by law, have the right to demand that anything they have ever published be taken down, no matter where it is? So a person has the right to contribute to a community for any given amount of time, and then pull out of that community and remove all their contributions?
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Source? Keep in mind that archiving Mastodon is pretty much inevitable: spin up an instance, connect widely, keep toots. There've been some announced archive projects, one of which flared out loudly a few weeks ago when I asked what the content removal policy was (the operator threatened retaliatory actions just for my asking, I saved their replies ... via the Internet Archive). IA basically have an "ask and we'll remove" policy for content removal. Given that Mastodon toots are parented (at least for source instances) under the user's profile URL, asking for a global removal is fairly straightforward. Email info@archive.org The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is also, at least for now, not very easily searchable. Having been involved in the project to archive Google+, it's 1) impressive at what they saved and 2) disappointing at what was missed, as well as 3) frustratingly difficult to track down specific items. If I've got a link, I can generally get there. If not ... it's much harder. I do think we need to come to some level of agreement/understanding of what can be / should be archived, and what should not. That's not easy. I'm not an archive absolutist (save everything), but I understand the value in saving even the ephemeral and non-obviously significant. Significance often increases in time and context.
  - sascha_sl 7y ago
    IA is fine. Archiveteam, which my comment references, has been doing it against user wishes. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Mastodon https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Mastodon https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=robots.txt https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=robots.txt They're not the same entity, although people often assume they are.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      I'm aware of Archiveteam, and worked with them on the G+ archive project. They've been sensitive to exclusion requests, and serve principally to move data to IA, where, again, removal requests are easy and recognised. IA have generally the same policy as AT on robots.txt, for entirely justifiable reasons. In the grand scheme of things, open, public, accessible archives >>> closed, private, nonaccessible (or accessible-only-for-a-(price|class) archives. Adding the capacity to denote specific exclusions assists further in this.

forgotmypw3 7y ago

Start making your own archive, saving the nicest things you find as .txt, .jpg, and .mp4.

KozmoNau7 7y ago

Conquer your FOMO and accept that not everything has to be permanent. It's okay that stuff is sometimes lost, it hurts a little and then after a little while it doesn't matter. I've lost my digital collections a number of times, and I just start over again. I also regularly delete my old content/comments wherever I can. Personal opinion, obviously.

lm28469 7y ago

It's just life. Society evolved to make everything a matter of "consume and move on to the next thing". Tbh I doubt anyone care about 99.99% of things that have ever been posted on internet, it's juste like paintings, books, movies, music, or any other medium, most of it disappear, some pieces stay forever, the world move on. It's nice to dive in the past from time to time but I don't need a 1:1 archive on 1996 online culture. There is so much low quality content dumped every second you'd be hard pressed to archive everything, youtube alone is hundreds of hours of video uploaded every minute, 24/7/365 for years. Weirdly enough the only pics left from my childhood aren't digital, they're from a 1980s film slr (that I still use to this day).

kace91 7y ago
I think this is the real danger, survival of personal data. Digital media is way more vulnerable if you don't know how to take care of it (taking care of physical photos is pretty straightforward in comparison). There's going to be a lot of people ignorant of the fact that media like CDs or even hard drives degrade, that lose their phones and the pictures in it without a backup, etc. whose memories will be wiped away. In my country for example, there used to be a fb clone that was all the rage back when I was a teenager (since fb wasn't translated to our local language yet back then). The company pivoted and its social media site went offline after a few years, and many many people lost memories that were exclusively kept there - I met the CEO in a conference a few months ago and he mentioned that he's off social media entirely because of the amount of people constantly contacting him to get their photos back.