this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Countless firsthand accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have disappeared across the last decade, and it may speak to larger issues with the historical record in the digital age.

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[–] fluxion 140 points 1 year ago (40 children)

Meanwhile archive sites are getting sued by greedy copyright owners

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So, in short, the whole “just someone else’s computer” thing will always come back to bite you. And of course, we’re still struggling with this. Here on the Fedi, everything is tied up on servers run by admins we know little about without much recourse to download archives or migrate, unless you’re up for full self hosting.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Except the fediverse is highly resilient in this regard, since all of the data is replicated. If an instance goes down, all of that instance’s posts are still available on every other instance.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There is that, yes. But how much control do you the user have over those caches should the original server/instance from which they were made go down? Can you easily archive or retrieve them? Edit or delete them? Do anything to further ensure their longevity? Link them back to your new social media account so that others can easily identify them as yours? Verify, in any way, that they were (or were not!) written by you as the owner of a new account?

[–] Deftdrummer 9 points 1 year ago

These are all good points.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

theoretically one couls create a lemmyverse archive that crawls the lemmyverse and subscribes to all communities it finds and archives all federation activities that it receives

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would you even need to subscribe?

Setting up an instance should probably work, unless other instances choose to defederate from it, I guess

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Instances only collect stuff from communities that have at least one subscriber on their sever.

[–] LazaroFilm 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

And it looks like it may only pull new posts and comments and not old archives.

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[–] FlyingSquid 38 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Imagine if, in 100 years, there was a massive Carrington Event and most of the world's data was destroyed. How would we piece our history back together?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"The aurora over the Rocky Mountains in the United States was so bright that the glow woke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning."

Lol, this must've been hella confusing.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Luckily, it is possible to shield the power supply from a carrington event at least, and we do have satellites keeping watch. The main issue is making sure all the power infrastructure is actually shielded, which costs money >.<

[–] superduperenigma 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Bro Texas won't even pay to weatherize their power grid and they know cold weather happens every winter.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Can't say you're wrong tbh :p

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[–] balder1991 3 points 1 year ago

To be honest this doesn’t make me any more optimistic. I’m sure there are countries that might spend resources on this, but mine 100% won’t. And if the majority of the world is screwed, I guess we can all agree there won’t be any stable place.

This episode of Why Files was really worrying.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty obvious. We build a time machine to go back to 1776. Then, when it malfunctions and sends to 1976 instead we learn the art of The Hustle.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'll be honest, I had forgotten MySpace was a thing back then. Every single page I went to was gaudy as hell and took forever to load on my dial up connection at the time. I'm a little surprised they're still around. And damn, it looks a lot different!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yea it’s a music centric site now, right?

Edit: I was curious so I looked it up. They either have 6-10 employees and 1-5M in revenue, or 523 employees and 84.2M in revenue, depending on whether you misspell ‘employees’ in the search or not (on bing).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't remember the specific article I read that dove into this but it was essentially sold due to it being one of the first large data collections (user data). I'm not sure the extent its traweled now but before the social media machine took off, it was the largest if not one of the largest concentrations of actual data points to run algorithms against.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Someday historians will be reading all those emails our grandparents printed looking for cultural context.

[–] Deftdrummer 13 points 1 year ago

Super interesting read, thanks for posting. (Pls don't delete my comment)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I see this as a plus. People have a right to be forgotten. The problem nowadays is that companies track you and keep all your data forever and then use it to advertise to you.

At the very least, data collection and preservation should be explicitly opt-in.

If you really want to save something, download it yourself.

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