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.
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"
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.
I have CDs I love that were released on labels that no longer exist. If I didn’t maintain my rips of those albums, I would have no way of listening to them, besides hopefully finding a used copy
I have a Fiona Apple bootleg concert CD that a friend from the Sony Fiona Apple message board made and mailed to me in 1999/2000. I lost touch with that friend when that message board got nuked for some reason that is lost to me now, but I still have that CD.
Very true. I’m a bit older than your “norm”, but I have Xanga friends I’ve travelled cross country for weddings for and I may or may not have a multi terabyte drive full of Napster era music.
how dare you call me out like that while I talk to a friend that migrated from ICQ to TeamSpeak to Mumble to... mostly Whatsapp and maybe Discord with me while watching a "decentralized backup copy" of a movie (you're welcome movie company)... even though I am 39 right now...
Ugh, this is so me. My oldest downloaded media files are approaching their 27th birthday, because I started college (and got access to something faster than 24k) in September 1997.
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
There was always a walled garden. Even gardens for gardens (aka offsite chats):
ICQ for certain games, Yahoo Messenger for certain RPGs, AIM for certain other RPGs, the orig Twitter for Second Life, IRC for some gamers, MSN Messenger for VRML users, and so on. Only recently this has splintered.
For me personally it was Teleview, an enhanced form of Telnet. I got it through a modem for upstream comms and a special radio antenna ISA card for downloads (significantly faster than the 2400bps the modem offered)
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.
I’m on the tail end of Gen X and my first online communities were ones I visited in the college computer lab and was basically at the mercy of webmasters who could afford the bandwidth. Or iffy free hosting services.
