2024-08-10: On Preservation and Information Death

It's been awhile. I've been keeping busy and posting a lot of stuff on Fediverse things I guess.

This month's been a thing. The theme seems to be the sunset of massive decades-old data stores and that data just slipping into the aether, or community wells suddenly disappearing. Or at least that's what it looks like from where I sit and the communities I exist in.

First you have RHDN which announced suddenly, out of nowhere for 99% of its users, that it would be deleting all the hacks, translations, and patches it had and becoming a news-only site. This change was more or less immediate but fortunately an archive of the patches was uploaded to the Internet Archive. In a terrible, disorganized, hard to discover and peruse format, but at least it's saved.

I'm not going to get into the politics here and now but it looks like the sudden direction change was precipitated by ego, an internal staff conflict, and one person holding all of the power over the site and deciding to fire the staff and change direction. 15 years of community around building and distributing hacks and translations gone in a blink. The forums are still unpreserved but it appears they'll remain up for now. I consider them a risk factor for data loss, and there's a lot there given RHDN has been the well for 15 years.

The big damage in my eyes though is all about timing. We're at a peak of people considering Discord to be an atom of community and information. More and more groups that produce something whether that be art, or romhacks, or games, or FAQs and information are opening Discord instances and just putting all their stuff there. I see "download" buttons that dump you unceremoniously at a Discord join screen now. It's anathema to preservation and ease of discovery; unfortunately the latter is sometimes considered a bonus point. Especially if what you're doing is grey-legal.

RHDN had decades of inertia behind it as the place to put your romhacks. I don't think any replacement will ever reach that level of central authority again and some, if not most, groups will just go "Nah just join our Discord". It sucks.

Given my conflict with them over Der Langrisser this may read as surprising. I guess my take is "they suck, but they suck in just the right way that they're irreplaceable".

Next you have Furaffinity, which has been the central nexus of furry art for 20 years. To put a fine point on it, it's a very large portion porn by volume; so you know, click with discretion. FA is also a community resource and a lot of people's first gateway into the fandom. It's a cornerstone, a mainstay. A lot of people would be cut off from massive parts of the community without it.

Its administrator and sole owner of the LLC that runs it also died suddenly this week.

There's a lot of discourse on if we should worry. A lot of the voices here are split 50/50 between "We should do nothing until the remaining site staff tell us there's a problem" and "We should panic and mirror the entire site immediately". Or at least that's how it seems when people are yelling at each other in a narrow comments field on a website. My take on it comes down to a few points:

We have no evidence the site has a continuation plan
If the LLC is not joint owned and the owner didn't have a will, it goes into state probate and the site's screwed
People should first be able to decide for themselves if they want to panic or not
A disorganized work-duplicated global mirror op will likely strain an already at-risk site
Any solution should assume the site will fail in the next 30-90 days but still provide value if it doesn't
When we're told to worry, it's already too late. Archival rushes will happen and time will be limited

Why 30-90 days? Bills. It could be sooner if the colocation service FA uses is practically prickly; it could be longer if everything was on auto-pay on a beefy credit card. This is the first concern for continuation in any case, as probate would take at least this long to sort out and the LLC fall into new hands. So 30 days is when I ballpark needing a solution in place for preservation.

My solution heavily focuses on point No5. I wanted to provide something that'd be useful even if the site lives, but extremely instrumental in saving stuff if it doesn't. That takes the form of covering a weakness all the current preservation tools have: they only grab galleries.

So I contacted a friend and talked out planning a tool for this, and that tool is fa-export-cli. It's a CLI tool for the moment so that renders it a little hard to use, but the focus here is to grab complete account data so you can back up your own account entirely, or grab someone else's. The main focus for the "someone else's" isn't so much scraping someone else's gallery into your personal library; it's grabbing the accounts of deceased artists who can't archive their own anymore.

As a result I'm trying to find and identify FA accounts of deceased furries and archive them. This is made difficult by that data (understandably) not being available anywhere.

The tool works; there's one bug as noted in the repo's issues, there's a mitigation for it. I encourage people to snag it if they can use it and focus on archiving accounts of people who are at risk of their data just being lost forever if the site goes down. But you can use it however you want.

I'm at an impasse on identifying what to grab with my limited time, bandwidth, and storage space at this point. Distribution is a concern too. Since it's a lot of porn, I doubt the Internet Archive wants to touch this.

Next up, last week Game Informer shut down. Game Informer was a magazine that had its peak in the Playstation and Playstation 2 days. It's been around for 30 years. The writing was kind of on the wall; they mostly moved to an online subscription service where you could get back-issues and special articles. It wasn't doing great.

The fact they shut down isn't as noteworthy as how they did it. As a holding of GameStop, GameStop's persistent cash bleed led them to target things for shutdown, and in a particularly brutalist manner. Story goes as the 13 person Game Informer team was being pulled into a conference room to be told they're all fired, someone redirected the entire Game Informer site, its archives, everything, to the sunset page you see in the link above.

Then they announced publicly they were shutting down. No one had a chance to grab anything. There's even writers who got frozen out of grabbing their work for their CVs.

This brings me to a point I've been making on Fedi for awhile now. This is the way of things in 2024. I sit in some industry watering hole chats where people talk about "how do we prevent the download rush after we announce shutdown" and the answer is increasingly becoming "Don't warn people you're shutting down". Expect more of this.

So that's a whole lot of gaming history gone. Also as a hilarious side-point of this: Game Informer, via GameStop, was the sole holder of publication rights for the pre-release information of the new Dragon Age game. So all of that game's marketing is gone too.

This crap doesn't just mean "old stuff" disappears, apparently!

As a micro bullet point to these, you have the destruction of Cartoon Network and Boomerang's streaming services. For years now Cartoon Network provided some of their library for free as a streaming service. Some real weird and crusty stuff there too. They suddenly yanked this up this week and replaced it all with an ad for Warner Brothers's new streaming service. Except some of their library just didn't get ported over. Licensing or something I guess.

So that stuff's gone. At least that's all likely archived in torrents and such.

But this too is a continuing trend of destruction of cultural media in the name of slimming down, centralizing, and pay-walling stuff. To them it's "There's no reason to offer The Herculoids; it's just storage space on our edges and no one watches it" but to someone like me? It's another resource for seeing old stuff that's gone with no replacement, in the name of maximum profit.

I'm largely a "Big chunky NAS full of video" person now and days for this reason.

It's been a rough month for people who give a flip about "stuff" still being accessible after the people monetizing it, or being responsible for it, stop. I'll tell you that much.

I'm trying to do something about all of these and I'm tired.

tags: preservation, personal