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.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Flame wars afire off the Usenet newsgroups. I watched the AV Clubs glitter in the dark before private equity. All this data will be lost in time, like a satellite TV channel in static.
i posit that 2000-2010 was the golden decade of the Internet
every positive interaction i have ever heard of that involved a “modern internet” connection happened during this time period
almost with no exceptions
after that that app-based connections to ‘the internet’ robbed us of that
Fortunately, meatspace reality never changes, so you can always just turn off the computer, touch grass, and go have coffee with your friend who lives 3000 miles away and you haven't really kept up with much in the last 8 years.
We all need TARDISes.
Agreed. GenX endured more walled gardens crumbling, going rancid, getting taken over by nazis, or just slowly becoming so damn annoying with animations and songs than any other generation.
It plays into the cynicism.
51 here. Yep. Going to a show tonight with a friend I met on my college's Usenet group(s) in 92 or 93. The wider Usenet and BBS friends are long lost, thoughm
Yes, exactly. Younger Xer who first logged on in Fall of 1996. I saw first the fading of Usenet, then the 90s Web (webrings, GeoCities, etc.), then the rise and fall of LJ, the rise and fall of Twitter, and Reddit eating the discussion boards (to say nothing of FB turning into Racist Uncle Central).
Inaccurate. I am tail end of Boomer & older than 55, and I am the same. Maybe I'm an outlier, but also, people age and that notional dividing line is fuzzy and mobile.
as one of the only zoomers on here, honestly microblogging just isn't as popular of a format for social media, so young people who were on twitter just didn't bother to migrate. Same way there was no real successor to facebook, the limitations of the platform just didn't sync with the youth culture
Oh dear, I am behaving inappropriately for an Aged Person (who is indeed, much, much, practically twice as much, older). What even are those things, I do not think I need to spend my declining years finding out rather than keeping up with existing friends over various venues.
Oh, yes, the younger people will learn too! It's just that they grew up with a handful of quite stable sites and haven't yet seen 4 different forums collapse yet.
ive had a handful of walled gardens die on me, but luckily i had already connected with the majority of my friends on other platforms before that
i got to watch an old forum board i was active on be there in the morning, and then cease existing by the afternoon. i lost friends when that happened
it wasn't until almost a year later that i found some of them again elsewhere
ive had a similar situation occur with an old IRC that i would chat in for hours a day
but im also a baby on the internet (23), and due to the rise of Discord, all my friends minus one are there now, which is kinda scary
