Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 21, 2022 7:56 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
Parent article: Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

One thing that worries me is archival. Like it or not, but Facebook or Blogspot are likely to exist for a long time, and even in the case of their demise, they'll likely be mirrored (as happened with Geocities).

I'm not sure if write.as is going to be available in 5 years (and I'm their paying user). Never mind self-hosted WriteFreely or Mastodon instances.

It'd be nice if services provided something like "forever insurance". E.g. guarantee that their content will be mirrored and hosted as static pages for at least 50 years in case they go down.

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 21, 2022 8:29 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

That is going to be difficult considering many of these sites have partially private content and likely also have some users which post copyrighted content and content violating other laws.

Not to mention that it is not trivial to turn a dynamic site into a static one and that companies who go bankrupt do not tend to have funds left to fund decade long endeavours.

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 21, 2022 18:14 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Private content can stay hidden forever, since it's private after all. I'm more concerned with published content disappearing.

> Not to mention that it is not trivial to turn a dynamic site into a static one and that companies who go bankrupt do not tend to have funds left to fund decade long endeavours.

Yeah. That's why it should be done as an insurance model where a third party would assume the burden of maintaining the archive.

And it's unclear how moderation or legal takedowns should be handled.

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 21, 2022 10:50 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (3 responses)

Like it or not, but Facebook or Blogspot are likely to exist for a long time

Such optimism may be somewhat unwarranted, considering current events. This time last year, that list would probably have read “Twitter, Facebook, or Blogspot”. Today, OTOH …

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 21, 2022 12:42 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Even if they do exist, it doesn't mean that they'd welcome archiving or such. Not to mention how much stuff is hidden behind a login screen (so just "members only" where membership is "give us your details").

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 21, 2022 18:07 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

I wouldn't give any of them that much credit.

Facebook seems to be perpetually on shaky ground, if not from the constant anti-monopoly litigation and horror stories about its contractor moderation sweatshops, then from the slow bleed of talent and growing resentment toward it in general. Blogspot seems like it's only online because some middle manager at Google forgot to shut it down; it very much feels like it hasn't seen a single bugfix or improvement to comment moderation since 2008.

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 22, 2022 16:04 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

All of those are just one crazy CEO away from wherever it is that failed Internet services go. For example, personally I wouldn't bet on the long-term viability of Facebook/Meta given that they're burning money like there's no tomorrow on the “Metaverse” – which Zuckerberg thinks is a great idea but which will suck and be ridiculous once it arrives (if it ever does) and which people may not actually even want or be able to afford –, while their core income-generating product is fast approaching Niagara Falls from upstream. (Remember that Zuckerberg can't be fired from Meta even if he becomes still more crazy than he already is.)

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 22, 2022 1:27 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (4 responses)

Remember Google Plus? Google just yanked it. No mirrors. Huge amounts of sci-tech content just gone (yes, many scientists and techies used it, it wasn't a "ghost town"). And before that Google yanked Orkut, which was pre-Facebook and widely used in some countries.

Google owns blogspot. I wouldn't depend on it being around forever.

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 22, 2022 1:38 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

There's an archive of G+: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_googleplus (made by https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Google%2B ). Ditto for Orkut: https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_orkut Even if the UI is not there, in future somebody can come back and add proper web UI.

So this kinda reinforces my point. When a large community dies, someone usually is going to archive it. When an individually hosted website dies, it's just gone.

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 22, 2022 3:23 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

A lot of Geocities didn't get archived. A whole bunch of content from Myspace vanished forever after a large database migration failure, and a shitload of music from the 2000s is pretty much gone forever as a result. I don't think decentralisation or open access to data necessarily guarantees data is kept (if you tie data access to the owner and the owner doesn't care, the data's going to vanish even if it later turns out to be historically interesting), but I also don't know that this fundamentally matters - the whole of history is littered with lost data and references that can't be followed.

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 23, 2022 7:30 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I thought that Geocities got completely scanned? Anyway, it's still much better than a complete loss.

> I also don't know that this fundamentally matters - the whole of history is littered with lost data and references that can't be followed.

It's the sheer amount of data that is lost. Most of it is admittedly very low-value, but still.

Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 29, 2022 16:36 UTC (Thu) by gray_-_wolf (subscriber, #131074) [Link]

Hah, I miss G+. It was a nice place, with (usually) pretty high quality posts. Possible due to "failing" to grow enough. It's shame google felt necessary to ax it.