There's an interesting problem in digital preservation, which is that preservation only exists actively. Only the things you actively move to new formats, survives.
Community is probably the same way: it has to be actively maintained in order to outlive whatever spot it's currently in.
The ideal social media is not actually any particular instance, but an up to date contact list. Everything else is details, and every hangout spot will inevitably go rancid.
That game you love vanishes if no one bothers to crack it and pirate it and emulate it.
That person you like, vanishes if the ground turns sour and you didn't figure out a way to find them after fleeing elsewhere.
If you're gen x or millennial, odds are you have known some people online for *decades*. Across multiple now-dead forums, across vast gulfs of time in internet years. You've probably got a friend group that outlived multiple sites.
Which is interesting. Gen X and millennials grew up having to learn how to use computers, how to go online, etc.
One of these skills later generations didn't learn, was how to reconnect outside walled gardens.
If you're over the age of 30, your first internet friends were outside walled gardens, they didn't really exist yet.
You found them, and then found them in half a dozen different places none of which were the really *important* thing. The important thing was they were there.
If you're *under* the age of 30, pretty much all you've known were walled gardens, you didn't really need to learn the skill of finding a friend hanging out somewhere else.
This is probably part of why everyone on bluesky is 38 years old: 38 year olds are basically the only people who consider it totally normal to flee a sinking ship and then just casually resume the conversation on the tropical island they end up on.
They've outlived dozens of ships.
People who are much older, are busy oogling shrimp jesuses and big boobied centaur women on facebook.
People who are much younger, only know 3 or 4 walled gardens and only maybe 1 has died on them so far.
People right there in the middle, though: they grew up before the walled gardens existed, when you had to learn how to form a community that could outlive places, and then did so for decades. Hopping from sinking ship and burning building repeatedly their whole lives, finding their friends again.
And, weirdly, this same group of people are also the ones who also learned how to preserve their media the same way.
Not *only* do they still talk to a person they met on ICQ 25 years ago, but they still have the same rip of a movie they pirated then too, or such.
The same generational cohort that learned how to actively preserve community beyond temporary hangouts, *also* learned how to actively preserve their media. In mostly the same way.
I spent months of my life looking for a song that I first heard on Youtube and got taken down, now I can't find it anywhere else. While it was live, I had both the idea and the opportunity to download it to my hard drive and preserve it forever, but I didn't.
The same can happen to communities.
I have a group of friends mostly in our 40s who are currently in a Discord server after we finally migrated off IRC a few years ago. The community started in the late 90s. And not long ago one of them hooked me up with a lossless rip of a CD I'd had in high school but lost.
our tendency to preserve media actually reminds me a lot of the way people who grew up during the great depression learned to stash away nonperishable food.
I’m 50, so I’m a little older, but everything you’ve said here applies to me. I’ve still got friends from down the street when I was 8, to email lists and most every SocMed that’s been interesting (RIP Ello)
My media stays in flux from cassettes/records on through terabytes of digital files 1/
One of the few redeeming features of Facebook for me is the community I belong to there that consists of the vast majority of the LiveJournal community we were in twenty years ago. Stumbling from wreck to wreck, trying to stay friends with people across the world.
Counterpoint: I learned to let everything die. Form no attachments in the knowledge that sooner or later, I will have to let all things rejoin the dust from whence they came. And yes, same for all these movies and games I pirated decades ago.
Look, I'm definitely not saying that was correct.
I’m a little over 40. I definitely have multiple internet friends who I always find at “the next place”, almost like magic sometimes. There are even a couple that I still keep tabs on that i’ve known since AOL days. Literally. Crazy to think about, tbh…
I saw someone post some lost media on Tumblr (a 90s showgaze band that released only on cassette before dissolving into new projects called Clayflower) but Tumblr is no place at all for preserving media so I went into the assets in the code and downloaded them.
I mean,I'm 22,but I hate to be in the same place with people that spewed out stupid shit like elon musk in twitter(yes,it's twitter.It will never be X).He is just one guy whom he thinks that he is way way "superior",but with racism,sexism,homophobia,transphobia,apartheid-ism,are there more of them?😬
Could you put this together into a blog post or something? This thread is excellent but I can't share it since your account isn't visible to non-logged-in users.
I've got hard drives full of stuff I pirated back in the 2000's when I was too poor to buy physical and streaming didn't exist. A ton of old fan sub anime that didn't have proper releases over here ever or until much later. It's this fun little digital time capsule of my teen years.
I maintain contacts via steam, discord, telegram and a handful of sites of varied actuvity. I'd still use AIM if it wasn't dead. Skype can die in a fire.
am i making this up or is it increasingly common among zoomers to believe stuff like "its stealing when you're saving someone's artwork to your computer"?? i really dont know if im making this up but i noticed a trend and related it to the rumor of "young ppl dont save and preserve files they like"
My kid grew up doing all of her homework in Google Docs, so getting her into the habit of backing up her hard drive was a challenge - she didn't have any personal files on her computer, so didn't see the point.
I have a 200Gb drive with mp3s on it dating back to the Napster and Limewire era. those files end up on every new desktop I own.
I think there might be old chatlogs on there as well.
one of my friends just sent me a link to a dropbox containing mp3s with no artist data and track names based on vibes rather than the actual song titles. it was the soundtrack to a tabletop RPG I ran in 1999.
