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.
Someday historians will be reading all those emails our grandparents printed looking for cultural context.
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.
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.
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?
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
Would you even need to subscribe?
Setting up an instance should probably work, unless other instances choose to defederate from it, I guess
Instances only collect stuff from communities that have at least one subscriber on their sever.
Ah interesting, didn’t know that :)
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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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!
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).
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.
Justin Timberlake owns like half of it nowadays.
Do not worry. History will not forget the murders American thugs comitted there.