Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

Posted Dec 22, 2022 1:27 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub by Cyberax
Parent article: Beyond microblogging with ActivityPub

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.