Matt Scharfstein
Caroline Orr BuenoSo, if Twitter goes to hell and just becomes defunct, we’re going to lose entire chapters of recent history — including evidence of war crimes, human rights violations, and more. I hope we’re all paying attention to this and considering what we need to do to ensure that a billionaire can’t decide which parts of history to retain — and which parts to erase forever.
Kinniska@rvawonk I remember when Obama had tweets archived to the national archives. We used to laugh at the idea what we said might be consequential or Important Enough. Then TFG came along and I’m sure there’s no more archiving.
Scott (personal)@rvawonk We need to start thinking about digital preservation infrastructure as a first-order part of civil society resilience measures. I like the work of groups like Mnemonic, as an example.
Karl(sad trombone enjoyer)@vortex_egg @rvawonk yes. This is so important going forward.
CJ@rvawonk I remember when the Library of Congress was archiving every tweet, maybe the Internet Archive manages logs of tweets. I remember my middle school teachers had us keep Newspaper journals after 9/11 and I wish I still had mine.
City Techie 
@rvawonk I guess this is how the ancients felt as they watched Julius Caesar set the Great Library of Alexandria on fire.
Anna Zarves@rvawonk Something so important should never have been privately owned.
Mark Tomczak@annasomeday @rvawonk and yet it only was built because private ownership allowed somebody to take the risk.
There was no reason to believe Twitter would be valuable until it was.
Coach Pāṇini ®@rvawonk what it just turns into Manhattan in the 70’s and 80’s for while?
Doa 
@rvawonk I really don’t think Twitter will go to hell. But Elon will bring to the ground, then blue sky ( jack) will come to the rescue and buy it? only after Elon cleaned the house, as Jack couldn’t because of all the relationships he had in the company. So musk did it for him. I might be wrong. Lol
Htaggert
TRiG
jrg@rvawonk Someone already thought about this years ago:
Thommy@thomasjwebb @rvawonk I can see that. I am sure it is nearly impossible to keep up with it. Hopefully someone steps in if the unlikely event of #ElonMusk pulling an FTX. (too soon?)
Dennis Jernberg@rvawonk That's why I believe the @internetarchive is more important than ever. If the Wayback Machine could preserve my old dead identi.ca page from 2009...
Faisal Kapadia@rvawonk I was wondering if there is a way to safeguard these important things like a backup someone can make what can be done?
Ta'veren@rvawonk Very good point! Is a record of a global conversation about the social policies that we choose to govern and shape the socio-economic space we live in. And of course discussions touching so many other aspects of life ranging from the "ridiculous to the sublime"!
Jason Perlow ✅🐧🍔 ✍️@rvawonk this is true of any large service though. I've been concerned flickr was going to die for year's and that's used by a lot of blogs for cheap image hosting
nscrut 
Brendan Boerner
Michel Maksimova@rvawonk I think it would be a long time before twitter evaporates from the internet and right now we have time to consider how to archive it and, importantly, which parts would even be ethical to archive. War crimes, certainly, but definitely not all of twitter
Cristina 🏳️🌈🇵🇹🇪🇺@rvawonk there’s still Wikipedia 😅
Lynda 
@rvawonk I’ve backed up my own archive, but unless everyone does 🤷🏻♀️
Dominic@rvawonk perhaps that’s why he bought it? The power to rewrite history is a powerful thing. Just ask the Chinese!
@GoodwinDominic @rvawonk I think he is more focused on ruining the future then rewriting the past.
@rvawonk I know that someone is making a point of archiving all the Dril memes.
Ian Brown 
@rvawonk SETI at home but for downloading and archiving every public Tweet ever
Jake Donham@jakedonham @rvawonk GNIP stopped this a long time ago AFAIK https://twitter.com/aspen/status/1591170518904098817?s=46&t=UZyTavDmsyC6CkYe8TLBag
Matt Getty on Twitter
“@jayholler @igb @biz @internetarchive Other gnip folks can chime in, but what biz says is partially wrong(gnip did the providing). We did provide data to LOC, a nightly HPT job iirc. I think we stopped because they admitted they couldn’t do anything (like provide search or whatever).”
juno
Marcel Fröhlich
sebastian büttrichIt s about time we download the thing ... not trying to be funny - at least some key activists/journalists/etc should start getting their archives, and coordinate
there s some good tools by now to help with that
i m getting mine - not that it has much of interest
@rvawonk I think my tweets about getting bad customer service from Delta can go in the trash
Rachel Maria@rvawonk Way Back link. https://archive.org/web/
Matthew Turland@rachel_maria65 what’s this a link to?
@rvawonk The organization that archives elected persons public posts. It’s a good research tool. Do you, or does anyone know, do the National Archives keep it?
plsburydoughboy (I/het/him)@rvawonk I was actually just reading a new interview from Myanmar Witness. It looks like they uploaded transcriptions tweet by tweet because they couldn't share video of the interview itself anywhere else
That was new and posted this week
Dubi is here 
@rvawonk i think you're a bit optimistic about how much of history is on twitter. But this does raise the question if news website won't soon regret embedding tweets instead of screenshotting them in much of their reporting.
Ilana Masad@rvawonk I have been thinking so much about this. How whether we like it or not, twitter is now part of the archive.
Salma Typhii@rvawonk time to archive
sangeetasanghvi@rvawonk @rvawonk isn't there a way to archive entire data?
Bill Childers@rvawonk The archive policy is listed on the Library of Congress website here (from what I can find): https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/files/2017/12/2017dec_twitter_white-paper.pdf
It sounds like we may lose a lot of the local 'color' to a situation, but the largest / most important tweets would be saved. But... who chooses what? I'd love to see the archive over the last few years....
femaven@rvawonk I think the internet archive has been doing some work on this
Sirpushalot@rvawonk great to see you here
Mike Sinno 
@rvawonk There was a good article on the subject by @stokel https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/11/1063162/twitters-imminent-collapse-could-wipe-out-vast-records-of-recent-human-history/
Alessio D'Angelo
Martin Rocket@alessiodangelo @rvawonk Maybe someone should develop a tool that scrapes the #WayBackMachine for Tweets and stores them as a machine readable format.
quackophage@rvawonk Web Archive has spent a good deal of time and effort on their Twitter archival service. I've written a tool that will automatically archive accounts, wondering if a list should be put together and the task distributed
The Mystic Pilgrim@rvawonk You know, I never actually thought of it this way; but you're absolutely right. Maybe, if we're lucking, an archiving service, such as the Wayback Machine, will archive such history.
Aral Balkan@rvawonk 16 years of tweets (most of them likely of no consequence) was the only reason I was keeping my account going. All the more validation that we – and not some corporation somewhere – must own and control our own content.
What is the Small Web?
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:
Joe CotelleseI think until deploying single instance is as easy as installing app adoption will stay low.
Years ago I ran my own email server. Eventually it got to be a hassle so I stopped.
I kind of feel that way with Mastodon & Pixelfed, I *could* install and run single instances but do I want to deal with the hassle.
Small instances like the one I'm on feel like a happy medium. There is implicit trust b/c I know the admin. Portability makes it easy to leave.
1/2
@JoeCotellese @rvawonk This.
Latest work ongoing on Kitten and Domain:
https://codeberg.org/kitten/app
https://codeberg.org/domain/app
@rvawonk Also, CC @brewsterkahle… what’s the state of Twitter archiving, do you know?
ChrisH@rvawonk I've been saving threads as pdfs so have at least archived some of it. I hope others have done/ are doing the same. Just in case it's needed.