Dave Troy Nov 13, 2022
Another design consideration re: Mastodon is that it works well for ephemeral asynchronous communications, but for many reasons should not be counted on as an archival resource. Media attachments are periodically purged and may not be available after a week, or a month, etc. While some servers may try to preserve content forever, this may be costly and unsustainable. Creators, researchers should treat this as an ephemeral resource and make provisions for self-archiving anything important.
Show threadAshton PittmanNov 13, 2022
@davetroy If accurate, this may be the biggest reason why Mastodon won't be able to become a Twitter replacement. The way Twitter serves as a cultural archive is indispensable. Although Elon Musk is working hard to trash it.
Show threadRuby S.
@ashton @davetroy I'm not sure it's a safe assumption that things we've posted to Twitter will continue to be publicly accessible in perpetuity. I'm not even sure they'll be available next week.
Nov 13, 2022 at 5:23pmWeb
Show threadDave Troy Nov 13, 2022
@ruby @ashton yes, and many people have also learned the hard way, via arbitrary suspensions, that Twitter cannot be counted on.
Show threadProgGrrlNov 14, 2022
@ashton @davetroy @ruby That’s right; a lot of folks on the bird site are downloading their archives right now. I’ve seen a wiki pop up to archive them, actually; but until I research that archive’s intentions I am just keeping mine on a hard drive.