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JHenckes's avatar

This is a subject that I can touch on a little with you:

I'm Brazilian, a user (almost all the time) of X (formerly twitter) and I've been closely following the banning process that has taken place here in the country.

Unlike authoritarian countries where media and journalistic control is greater and focused on actually suppressing the rights of the population, what happened in Brazil was not intended to do so.

The Brazilian government has in its constitution the need for a representative of the foreign company to act in person in Brazil, but Elon Musk did not accept this measure (which has been demanded of him for several months) alleging various things that have never been proven true.

So the government decided to ban the platform for not following these rules, you see. I believe it's something temporary, very much like a battle of Elon Musk's ego, but that an agreement should be reached soon.

As for this media control that we see happening in various places, I think it's important to a certain extent, it's complex, but there really are things that should be considered a crime when said, because they go beyond freedom of expression itself, and start to become a discussion of hate, a spread of fake news or even a cybercrime as already described in the law.

I don't think we should accept anything quietly, but it's important to understand each context of why something happened that way. I'm not fighting or correcting you hahaha, the intention was just to approach the subject in more detail to enrich the discussion!

Boomer's avatar

Thanks JHenckes for the added context! I don't take it as fighting or correcting, and I'm happy this is something we can discuss 🙂

I think this is the right move by the Brazilian government. I'm concerned that the loss of such a platform will have a negative impact on users, but this doesn't give any company the right to break the law.

Twitch was different as it was a financial decision and TikTok is about concerns over privacy and data sharing.

I'm curious whether the platform users would want that information (their posts, follower/subscriber interactions etc.) preserving, even if it was only in an archive?
The information is already shared publicly, so how would users feel if that was backed up and made available in an online archive after those platforms shut down?

I might have an odd perspective on this as I research online communities and like the idea of exploring our digital history 😁 It would be like a digital library of social interactions, but only the public posts would be available.

P

I might have an odd perspective on this as I research online communities and like the idea of exploring our digital history 😁 It would be like a digital library of social interactions, but only the public posts would be available.

What do you hope to solve by this?

Lanah Tyra's avatar

AO3 was always a fanfiction site for me, I never thought about it beyond that as an actual archive.

I have lost so much content when my PC broke, that now I have backups of the backups... but some of those are in the cloud, so what if that cloud provider gets suspended one day? Nothing is safe thought, because even if we kept everything on paper, a library or physical archive can burn down and knowledge lost.

So what would be the best way to preserve knowledge, and what counts as knowledge and what is just... useless information?

Boomer's avatar

what counts as knowledge and what is just... useless information?

Exactly, that's the big question!

As I mentioned to JHenckes above, I might have a bit of an odd perspective.
My uni research is almost entirely based on historic social interactions in online communities, so even the most useless information gives me insight into what was meaningful to them 😄

I don't know how useful it will be, but I wonder if the users of those platforms would be interested.

It's a bit like looking at old photos (before digital cameras!), but instead of having single frames from our memories we have a transcript and rich media to look at.

P

I miss MySpace...

I think a lot of musicians felt really bad after what happened to all their music files on that site.

Same could be said for "bloggers" on that platform.

I don't think any social media platform has even been able to capture that "feeling" which MySpace had up until the wheels started coming off.

Boomer's avatar

For me it had the same feeling of raw chaos that comes when you first walk into a festival campsite 😄 Like you generally know what's happening, but every time you turn a corner you might find something to surprise you (good or bad!).

It reminds me of a quote from the book The Ambiguity of Play:

One supposes that with military parades the marchers and bands have some jingoistic community rhetoric close to their consciousness, but that with festivals and celebrations, such traditional rhetorical matters are most likely in the background, and the ecstacies of dress, dance, music, and song are in the foreground." (Sutton-Smith, 2001, p93)

P

Well, apparently Tumblr are now owned by WordPress... Will certainly be interesting to see what happens to that blogging platform.

I was never on Tumblr... I didn't understand the user interface... To me, it felt intuitive. I sort of understood what was going on, but there was also an element of raw chaos as well.

I think the best "platforms" incorporate a sense of play.

Boomer's avatar

Yeah I saw that, but apparently Automattic bought Tumblr back in 2019! 😲

From what I've read it seems the UI will still be Tumblr but the CMS will be full-on Wordpress.
I don't think it's a bad call, but it's odd that it's taken this long!

I agree about Tumblr feeling chaotic. The very few times I visited it I just couldn't navigate it very well. This is probably 8-10 years ago though 😅

CMDR Henckes's avatar

It's a complicated subject because to keep this archived and preserved is a hard thing to do since our ancient times, it isn't restricted to digital archives only. I think its a good thing to sabe the digital archives in site like archive.org, i used it sometimes already. But the important thing to keep in mind is that your arts and archives will be more save if saved in more than one place, for exemplo in a cloud or in a external storage or even a DVD that is hard to get corrupted. I think this is important for everything, because external storage can break and clouds can cease its services anytime.

Boomer's avatar

Seems we timed this discussion perfectly! 😫

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/internet-archives-e-book-lending-is-not-fair-use-appeals-court-rules/

Having archives in more than one place is great advice!

My partner and I have recently been taking care of some life admin, such as sorting and storing important documents, family photos etc.

We used to just store things on our PCs but for added protection we backed everything up to the cloud. Last month we bought a small fire and waterproof safe, so now we have three backups - one physical in the safe and two digital (local and in the cloud)!

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