I'm sick so that means you get cataloging ramble

[lb_lee]

It wasn't something I consciously realized I was doing, but within the past couple days, I realized that the healthymultiplicity.com resource index is overwhelmingly books or self-owned websites (or their Wayback Machine archived versions), even though that has become comparatively rare. A lot of why I use them as citations boils down to stability and accessibility.

It's not that I have anything against, say, citing a tumblr. (By nowadays standards, tumblr is actually one of the better ones.) But when you can change your URL with one click, then it makes it very likely I'll have to spend some time chasing down the new one, over and over again, updating the link and metadata. Multiply that by a few dozen links, and the time and effort racks up. (This is also why we started asking permission to keep local copies of everything. If a link rotted out from under us, at least we'd still have something.)

Even if someone keeps the same URL and presence over the course of years (and bless you), there's still no telling if the website itself will rot or start requiring an account to access it. (Looking at you, Twitter. Not that I was ever going to cite anything from you, it is impossible to make a decent resource in your tiny-ass character limit and I refuse on principle to link a forty-tweet chained thread. That is way too many links I have to trust to remain up and connected in a readable order, and if one of those links breaks, good luck ever finding it ever again.) Instagram? Can't link it. Tumblr? Well, I can still link it (for now), but searching and digging through archives requires an account now. And Livejournal's code has corrupted really badly in the past couple years; profile data, follower names, even comments are just GONE in a lot of cases.

I rely on the Internet Archive for a lot of things. And the Wayback Machine is way better at keeping track of self-owned websites than social media, probably by design. The whole point of social media companies is they want to keep you there. They don't want stuff to escape the silo. They want to be the ones who control the information, not you, because they are information merchants. That's where they make their money.

I can't really be on social media. Heck, Dreamwidth is my limit these days. It's not even an ethical or philosophical thing anymore; it's a disability thing. Shoulder and cracked brain means, gotta be careful how I use the Internet. This means I've become increasingly outdated and old-fashioned. A lot of plurals these days use terminology I don't know; their fights and bugaboos are foreign to me. I don't feel like I'm irretrievably irrelevant yet, because some things stay the same, people will always need resources on how to survive, and history has value, but I know I'm behind the digital times, and so is healthymultiplicity.com. But at least the stuff it cites won't just disappear into the ether in five seconds.

I'm really glad that there's been a blossoming Neocities scene and a resurgence in having your own website and domain. Because social media might be omnipresent, but it's the equivalent of sticky notes on barn doors, constantly blowing off into the wind, never to be found again. Self-owned websites are far from forever, but they at least stick around better.

Comments

[the_broken_tower]

The Cardinals left some deeply ground-in anxiety over data loss (and loss of control over data).

That was back before anyone tried using social media, and being hyper aware of how transient and fragile records are is a major reason we aren't compatible with most social media platforms. Hell, the first forum anyone joined was disbanded less than a year later, and all the posts there were lost to time. Wayback can't get around security walls even if it's linked directly to a post.

Not actually owning your data, not having a reliable means to export it in a useful format, and the insecurity of posts or accounts being deleted by The Company on a whim with no notice or appeal - all no good. Social media doesn't give you the grace of a warning. We value records and information too much to keep putting that in a place where it may disappear without notice and be irrecoverable in ten years.

Is the Wayback Machine useful for saving specific Tumblr posts? That's one solution I could think of to have a reliable record on that platform.

- Ezio (he/him)

[lb_lee]

We are a bit notorious for being obsessive about our own records. *waves at the hundreds of pages of back-up records, pats local LJ archive back-up with fondness* Dreamwidth's Export Journal seems a bit creaky, but at least it exists! (And regrettably, while LJarchive has apparently worked for DW archiving in the past, all of LJarchive's documentation... is on Livejournal, where due to code rot, all the comments are now no longer viewable.)

And yeah, so many websites pop up and disappear very quickly! There was a plural skeptics site we were on briefly, and the place disappeared. Even though we weren't on it for long, it's a shame that info was lost; I recall some really neat conversations happening there. (And I know tulpa.io was huge and lost EVERYTHING a good while back. I ended up getting permission to rehost at least one thing from there!)

The Wayback Machine is actually pretty good for tumblr, the text anyway! I relied on it for my Gallifreyan Tradition Society write-up, to work around the mass-locking and mass-deleting. It does require you know the usernames of the correct time period, though; if you change your handle from the_broken_tower to broken_towers to faulty_towers, you gotta make sure to search through the Wayback Machine with all those domains. (But many sites have this issue; Livejournal's URL formatting changed quite a lot over the years, and so searching for old LJ stuff on the Wayback Machine involves a lot of "okay, I searched the_broken_tower.livejournal.com and community.livejournal.com/the_broken_tower, now what was it before 2005, livejournal.com/users/the_broken_tower...?" It's kinda dreadful to realize that because we were there on LJ for long enough, we're able to search through better just because we remember the old URL switches.)

Video, audio, and images on the Wayback Machine are always a crapshoot, though, even at the best of times.

[the_broken_tower]

Hey, a question about the exporter -

Do you need specific tech for it to work, and does it save to the computer you're using? We've never used one before but losing shit is a major cause of anxiety on this side.

- Amber (he/him)

[lb_lee]

Nope, DW's exporter requires no outside tech. It's got a FAQ explaining how to use it here: https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=175&q=Export&lang=

I was able to download my own DW archive (well, from 2015 on, already had the earlier stuff) within an hour or so. It's tedious and the output's formatting is a little borked, but it does the job!

[acorn_squash]

In my experience, the Wayback Machine is pretty useful for preemptively saving the text of important posts. It's not always very good with images, though. The main thing is that you need to archive the specific links that are important, and then write down elsewhere what those links were.