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.
Indeed, the same has already happened to me with some friends I used to play online games with 15 years ago. I don't have a way to reach out to them anymore, and I don't even know if they're still alive.
We must maintain our cherished friendships online, or they will inevitably shift and fade away as platforms crumble and contact info changes. Same is true with our media. Hard drives are cheap, new social platforms are free, and memories are priceless.
I think about this a lot. I have a hard crystalized diamond of online friends from various places I've known for decades, but what happened to the people that I lost to time and undiagnosed mental illness? I can only hope they're okay, that they're beboppin' along living mostly content lives.
I even remember my old Halo friends' names, including the real names of two of them because I was friends with them all on facebook back when I had an account there.
TapouT, allJakDup, Y'ALL, SD-JO, plop_plop, and later people from the modding community like Oxide and AElitePrime.
Oxide wrote a server mod that allows for scripting, and AElitePrime wrote the first server-side anticheat I've ever seen. TapouT owned a modded server, and I and the rest of the guys spent hours and hours every day playing on there back in 2009-2011.
That's all stuff I can never get back...
I think the longest friendship I ever had was with someone that lasted over a decade, but I do not know how anyone would have an online only friendship that would have lasted 20+ years... if people don't have any connection outside of the internet the chance of the friendship surviving is VERY slim.
It helps if you’re all part of an overlapping cohort
I might not have met my friend Chris in person but he’s friends with with my other friend Larry, who has
Not really. That's a different one. The song I'm looking for is titled "cowboy from japan" but his nickname is also "cowboy from japan" so it's confusing the search engines.
That, and corporations can just take away your streamed content whenever they feel like it.
If they wanna take away my physical media, they'll have to break into my house.
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.
On the topic of the thread, did you ask hear Freenode had a hostile takeover by a Korean prince (yes really) and everybody moved new servers (mostly that libre-something server, also some to Matrix protocol servers)
Libera chat!
Honestly, the whole thing seemed like a predecessor to what happened to Twitter, except the entire community was tech savvy enough to move en masse and say "we're all over here now"
Technically, since anyone can run an IRC server and clients are freely available, there is no reason for it to ever stop existing.
That's the beauty of how the web used to work, before the big megacorps herded us all into their own walled gardens.
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/
Some of my best friends are scattered across the globe, and I’ve spent IRL time with many of them.
But I’ve also been an outsider of sorts in my generation. They missed my neurodivergency, and no one understood why I never wanted to fully “grow up”.
I’ve just always been weirdo ME 🤷♂️
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.
Might be worthwhile to check if there's already better sourced stuff of the particular version of media you're ripping. Lot of stuff that was in rentalhouses never made it forward but a lot did and these days there's multiple niche companies that do insane restorations of obscure stuff. :)
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.
oooh six digit here! SIX!
I once had to contact the yahoo domain admins to get my old geocities email active long enough to reset the creds on it
ICQ will stop working on jun 26 but you and I, man, we'll remember
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…
As @greyduck.bsky.social can testify I’ve been using Lyse or a specific variant (when “lyse” was taken) online since the time of AOL chat, Usenet’s, and Juno email. Makes it fairly easy to find me for those that want to look.
I think for me it’s a mix of using the same email and usernames very constantly for most of my life, and the types of circles I made those friends in. But there are definitely tools that can be used to make one’s digital self much more easily trackable.
