5 ms·

And this is the dangers of relying on a private, corporate, for-profit law-bound organization. They're susceptible to abiding by the laws and of course, there i

by tcd 7y ago

And this is the dangers of relying on a private, corporate, for-profit law-bound organization. They're susceptible to abiding by the laws and of course, there is a cost attached to all of this. Exploiting a free resource, as we all do these days (reddit, youtube, facebook, hackernews itself etc) is all well and good but maintaining history is expensive (content needs moderating, you are required to abide by the GDPR and DMCA, there may be disputes about content on the platform). I mean, Google+, MySpace, Bebo, IMDB comments is now dead and gone, how useful was the data really? I'm sure some people might go to archives but I would imagine 95% of the data is just "rot" that has no value or substance. History is lost all the time, we barely know what we've been up to the last few thousand years only now can we so extensively document our world with the precision and quality afforded to us. But in the end, time moves on and some of that history is lost, it hurts, but whose to say any archived history will be preserved anyhow? We're still relying on our storage technology being readable years/decades/centuries from now, which is not a given.

Diagon 7y ago
While I agree with your first point, and tried to get groups I was associated with to move for years, nevertheless there are groups there that engaged in community driven research and have important data uploaded there. (This is my main concern, though other groups were focused on different issues - uploaded art, for example.) So I think while we need to educate people about not using centralized providers like Yahoo and Google, right now we need to focus on getting someone at Verizon/Yahoo to respond to this urgent situation.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Protocols, not Platforms ! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059
  - Diagon 7y ago
    I totally agree. Google? FB? Twitter? How about the Friendiverse? :)
TeMPOraL 7y ago
> maintaining history is expensive (content needs moderating, you are required to abide by the GDPR and DMCA, there may be disputes about content on the platform). Things shouldn't be like this. The price per unit of storage and bandwidth falls fast (and, except for the sites dealing with user-generated videos, faster than the amount and size of content grows). Laws shouldn't apply retroactively. The problem really is that our means of accessing information are services. When you have a physical letter, or an e-mail saved locally, or a text message from 15 years ago, you can just read them. Nobody will know or care. Nobody will come after you trying to apply GDPR or DMCA retroactively. And since storage is near-free, you won't ever lose it until you forget about it (or at least about doing regular backups). Whereas with modern webmail, forums, link aggregators, IMs - you don't have even your own messages, and viewing a conversation that happened 15 years ago is really being provided a service today. Services are ephemeral, they're also subject to ever-changing regulations and whims of the service providers. Bottom line, while services are necessary for transferring conversations, we really shouldn't be relying on them for access to conversations that already happened.
- donaltroddyn 7y ago
  If you are a company, GDPR does apply to data on physical letters and local emails. A large part of the preparation for the introduction of GDPR enforcement was companies getting a handle on what they had stored in various media.
  - merb 7y ago
    actually email and letters are something which the gdpr falls short in some countries. especially germany. since basically the constitution is above the gdpr and depending on the letter/email the content of the letter does not need to be acknowledged or showed (gdpr also means you can access your data) to the person who want his data deleted/showed/whatever.
    - big_chungus 7y ago
      All true, but costs of hosting and serving aside, there is a non-zero legal cost with hosting and serving the content. Blame bureaucrats, parasite lawyers, and our litigious society.
myth_drannon 7y ago
We can still read Fidonet messages decades after BBSs died. The power of decentralized networks.
- philpem 7y ago
  I'm curious where you'd find these -- do you have any links to Fidonet archives? It's been a while since I looked, but I didn't find anything significant last time I did.
  - friedegg 7y ago
    Some were gated over to Usenet, and you can see traces in Google Groups, but I'm not aware of any mass archive of them.
  - myth_drannon 7y ago
    Some more details here https://breakintochat.com/blog/2019/11/26/fidonet-archive-update/ https://breakintochat.com/blog/2019/11/26/fidonet-archive-up...
ajsnigrutin 7y ago
We cannot excpect a private company to continue paying for resources they don't want to. But giving a "export all the data in xml/json/whatever" button, and maybe even opensourcing the now-abandoned component serving this data, would be nice move. The first part could even become a regulative requirement some day.
dredmorbius 7y ago
A very substantial portion (~98% of all public posts) of Google+ was successfully archived, at the Internet Archive, thanks to the Archive Team. As a longtime G+ user, and one of the organisers behind the G+ "Plexodus", the existence, assistance, and capabilities of the Archive Team were hugely appreciated. AT and the Internet Archive have succeeded in preserving other content, though not all projects are successful. You can see a partial listing at https://www.archiveteam.org/ https://www.archiveteam.org/ Even as notorious a "wasteland" as Google+ (a naming I've had some role in establishing: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq) had many millions of actual active users, and tens of thousands of active communities (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%2B_Communities#Google.2B_Community_Characteristics_and_Membership https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%...). Unlike numerous other shutdowns, Google announced the G+ shutdown well in advance, though they "accelerated" the schedule twice, from "sometime in August 2019" to April 1, 2019, the eventual shutdown date. The tools Google offered for archiving and migrating content, whilst among the best in the industry (an exceptionally low bar), were incredibly insufficient: buggy, incomplete, duplicative, and not readily portable). It was largely third-party tools and assistance -- the Friends+Me Google+ archiver and ArchiveTeam most especially -- that meaningful preservation was possible. The conceit of large-scale, free-to-use services has been convenience, capability, and trust, the last a point Google explicitly made in its original G+ announcement: You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don’t take this lightly. In fact we’ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, working for an open Internet, and respecting people’s freedom to be who they want to be. We realize, however, that Google+ is a different kind of project, requiring a different kind of focus—on you. That’s why we’re giving you more ways to stay private or go public; more meaningful choices around your friends and your data.... https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-p... That trust has been repeatedly violated. And in actively opposing archival efforts, Google, Yahoo, Flikr, and others, are violating that trust only so much the more. In the G+ shutdown, it was the active dismissal, obstruction, and interference of Google and its user-based support team (the so-called "Top Contributors") which were most disappointing. Long-time Google supporter Loren Weinstein made this point specifically and repeatedly: https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/29/googles-g-user-trust-betrayal-gets-worse-and-worse https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/29/googles-g-user-trust-be... I'll note that this tends to strongly reduce the value proposition of all Web 2.0 / SaaS offerings, given that even the very largest and wealthiest companies are willing to act in this manner. The consistency of this behaviour and attitude across multiple service providers makes me think that the behaviour and practices are not coincidental or unintentional.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Maintaining a static archive is remarkably inexpensive. The total amount of textual data included in even Google+ was likely only a few hundred GB. Images and multimedia, of course, would have been far more, though sampling-based estimates suggest that these were a few hundred KB each, on average, on about 30% of all posts. The mean post size on G+ was rougly the same as on Twitter: about 120 characters. (Quite possibly because most G+ posts were themselves repurposed Twitter content.) Static content does not require ongoing moderation, though it's possible that problematic content will be periodically identified. The bigger challenge is actually in the publishing engines. Even where these are static, it's possible that vulnerabilities will be identified. That was Google's (not especially convincing) excuse. A challenge of the Internet Archive / Archive Team method of archival and access is that in preserving the original formatting and packaging of content, the bandwidth and storage requirements are increased tremendously. By about two orders of magnitude in the case of G+. Were the Archive to focus on the actual originally-authored content rather than all the associated chrome, both factors would be tremendously reduced.

by tcd 7y ago

Diagon 7y ago

While I agree with your first point, and tried to get groups I was associated with to move for years, nevertheless there are groups there that engaged in community driven research and have important data uploaded there. (This is my main concern, though other groups were focused on different issues - uploaded art, for example.) So I think while we need to educate people about not using centralized providers like Yahoo and Google, right now we need to focus on getting someone at Verizon/Yahoo to respond to this urgent situation.

BlueTemplar 7y ago
Protocols, not Platforms ! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059
- Diagon 7y ago
  I totally agree. Google? FB? Twitter? How about the Friendiverse? :)

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> maintaining history is expensive (content needs moderating, you are required to abide by the GDPR and DMCA, there may be disputes about content on the platform). Things shouldn't be like this. The price per unit of storage and bandwidth falls fast (and, except for the sites dealing with user-generated videos, faster than the amount and size of content grows). Laws shouldn't apply retroactively. The problem really is that our means of accessing information are services. When you have a physical letter, or an e-mail saved locally, or a text message from 15 years ago, you can just read them. Nobody will know or care. Nobody will come after you trying to apply GDPR or DMCA retroactively. And since storage is near-free, you won't ever lose it until you forget about it (or at least about doing regular backups). Whereas with modern webmail, forums, link aggregators, IMs - you don't have even your own messages, and viewing a conversation that happened 15 years ago is really being provided a service today. Services are ephemeral, they're also subject to ever-changing regulations and whims of the service providers. Bottom line, while services are necessary for transferring conversations, we really shouldn't be relying on them for access to conversations that already happened.

donaltroddyn 7y ago
If you are a company, GDPR does apply to data on physical letters and local emails. A large part of the preparation for the introduction of GDPR enforcement was companies getting a handle on what they had stored in various media.
- merb 7y ago
  actually email and letters are something which the gdpr falls short in some countries. especially germany. since basically the constitution is above the gdpr and depending on the letter/email the content of the letter does not need to be acknowledged or showed (gdpr also means you can access your data) to the person who want his data deleted/showed/whatever.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    All true, but costs of hosting and serving aside, there is a non-zero legal cost with hosting and serving the content. Blame bureaucrats, parasite lawyers, and our litigious society.

myth_drannon 7y ago

We can still read Fidonet messages decades after BBSs died. The power of decentralized networks.

philpem 7y ago
I'm curious where you'd find these -- do you have any links to Fidonet archives? It's been a while since I looked, but I didn't find anything significant last time I did.
- friedegg 7y ago
  Some were gated over to Usenet, and you can see traces in Google Groups, but I'm not aware of any mass archive of them.
- myth_drannon 7y ago
  Some more details here https://breakintochat.com/blog/2019/11/26/fidonet-archive-update/ https://breakintochat.com/blog/2019/11/26/fidonet-archive-up...

ajsnigrutin 7y ago

We cannot excpect a private company to continue paying for resources they don't want to. But giving a "export all the data in xml/json/whatever" button, and maybe even opensourcing the now-abandoned component serving this data, would be nice move. The first part could even become a regulative requirement some day.

dredmorbius 7y ago

A very substantial portion (~98% of all public posts) of Google+ was successfully archived, at the Internet Archive, thanks to the Archive Team. As a longtime G+ user, and one of the organisers behind the G+ "Plexodus", the existence, assistance, and capabilities of the Archive Team were hugely appreciated. AT and the Internet Archive have succeeded in preserving other content, though not all projects are successful. You can see a partial listing at https://www.archiveteam.org/ https://www.archiveteam.org/ Even as notorious a "wasteland" as Google+ (a naming I've had some role in establishing: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq) had many millions of actual active users, and tens of thousands of active communities (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%2B_Communities#Google.2B_Community_Characteristics_and_Membership https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%...). Unlike numerous other shutdowns, Google announced the G+ shutdown well in advance, though they "accelerated" the schedule twice, from "sometime in August 2019" to April 1, 2019, the eventual shutdown date. The tools Google offered for archiving and migrating content, whilst among the best in the industry (an exceptionally low bar), were incredibly insufficient: buggy, incomplete, duplicative, and not readily portable). It was largely third-party tools and assistance -- the Friends+Me Google+ archiver and ArchiveTeam most especially -- that meaningful preservation was possible. The conceit of large-scale, free-to-use services has been convenience, capability, and trust, the last a point Google explicitly made in its original G+ announcement: You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don’t take this lightly. In fact we’ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, working for an open Internet, and respecting people’s freedom to be who they want to be. We realize, however, that Google+ is a different kind of project, requiring a different kind of focus—on you. That’s why we’re giving you more ways to stay private or go public; more meaningful choices around your friends and your data.... https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-p... That trust has been repeatedly violated. And in actively opposing archival efforts, Google, Yahoo, Flikr, and others, are violating that trust only so much the more. In the G+ shutdown, it was the active dismissal, obstruction, and interference of Google and its user-based support team (the so-called "Top Contributors") which were most disappointing. Long-time Google supporter Loren Weinstein made this point specifically and repeatedly: https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/29/googles-g-user-trust-betrayal-gets-worse-and-worse https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/29/googles-g-user-trust-be... I'll note that this tends to strongly reduce the value proposition of all Web 2.0 / SaaS offerings, given that even the very largest and wealthiest companies are willing to act in this manner. The consistency of this behaviour and attitude across multiple service providers makes me think that the behaviour and practices are not coincidental or unintentional.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Maintaining a static archive is remarkably inexpensive. The total amount of textual data included in even Google+ was likely only a few hundred GB. Images and multimedia, of course, would have been far more, though sampling-based estimates suggest that these were a few hundred KB each, on average, on about 30% of all posts. The mean post size on G+ was rougly the same as on Twitter: about 120 characters. (Quite possibly because most G+ posts were themselves repurposed Twitter content.) Static content does not require ongoing moderation, though it's possible that problematic content will be periodically identified. The bigger challenge is actually in the publishing engines. Even where these are static, it's possible that vulnerabilities will be identified. That was Google's (not especially convincing) excuse. A challenge of the Internet Archive / Archive Team method of archival and access is that in preserving the original formatting and packaging of content, the bandwidth and storage requirements are increased tremendously. By about two orders of magnitude in the case of G+. Were the Archive to focus on the actual originally-authored content rather than all the associated chrome, both factors would be tremendously reduced.