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.
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"
tangentially, in a way that lots of ppl are paranoid that someone will repost their work on instagram / mint as an nft / add to a LLM. but i find it ironic that in wanting to protect themselves against crypto bros they fall into a "you wouldn't screenshot a jpg" line of thinking themselves
as i said, i have no clue if there's any actual trend there or im just imagining it. only just saw a bunch of ppl really concerned about screenshots and downloads and wishing for them to be disabled on social platforms, and it got me thinking
and if it's really true that younger ppl tend to lack habit of you know… just putting files on their computer for own enjoyment and to keep them safe… having no context of it being normal behavior… i could see them start feeling this way in reaction to current cyber-grift landscape
I've seen some of it but not much. They have a very different expectation of privacy, if something feels ephemeral to them they want it to ephemeral for everybody, they don't adjust to how the technology works because they mostly don't know how it works
That reeks of Snapchat to me. I have maybe three connections on there, and it has always annoyed me that stuff just disappears if you aren’t allowed specifically to save it somehow.
after cara exploded i joined the suggestion 'forums' on discord and this is mostly where ive seen it repeat, rather than in public discourse. but you might be onto something there
like, you share a picture online on a public profile, someone's browser already downloaded it if it's being viewed in the first place, but there seem to be ppl (dont know if very few or many) who feel violated if that file gets into someone's personal folder rather than browser cache (?)
As a kid I was hanging out on Wikipedia and gaming / tech site forums, picked up a ton of general knowledge from that, but younger generations are spending so much more time on photo/video oriented social media instead, from devices where everything is sandboxed
This is probably a big oversimplification, but I feel like ppl who first got online after the whole Napster situation, after it turned into a series of different walled gardens, those ppl are mostly being confronted with an IP-enthusiast POV instead of the internet golden age information freedom POV
this is really interesting to me and id like to read/listen to a good analysis of it. i myself got onto internet bunch of years after napster (when napster was a thing my familiy didnt have a computer, i was a little kid, and did not speak english) but i was on regular forums in my early teens
