What we’ve lost: The MySpace war files and the impact of a digital 'Dark Age'
What we’ve lost: The MySpace war files and the impact of a digital 'Dark Age'
What was lost has escaped notice, alarming experts.
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.
Meanwhile archive sites are getting sued by greedy copyright owners
.... for illegally distributing copyrighted material....
I'm so tired of whiny bitches expecting everything for free
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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
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I increasingly suspect there are false dichotomies here. A user need not take full responsibility for their personal server/instance on the federation for them to truly own their data and presence. They only need to own a discrete component in the network that is easily moved and that contains their own personal information and identity. This component could just as easily be hosted on a large cloud service as it could on a bedroom Raspberry Pi, and, if truly nomadic, moved from being on one and then the other as is necessary.
It seems to me that most architectural thinking on this point fails to consider anything other than the "hardware" or server, in more or less traditional network terms, when, it seems to me, the issues concern the presentation and address-ability and mobility of the user as a discrete object.
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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?
"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.
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 >.<
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.
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.
"All things are made of atoms; little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."
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.
Someday historians will be reading all those emails our grandparents printed looking for cultural context.
Super interesting read, thanks for posting. (Pls don't delete my comment)
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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Do not worry. History will not forget the murders American thugs comitted there.
