“This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted,” Internet Archive director of archiving and data services Jefferson Bailey told the Standard, “like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online.”
I’ve seen several examples of things wiped before, so I’ve always been a bit skeptical of that adage. I’ve seen several niche forums, or even forums of small newspapers - just go completely offline.
It might be these are still sitting around on backups somewhere and will some day come to light and be hosted by some entity in an open format…
I made forum posts going as far back as 2000. Almost all of them are gone forever due to the reasons you mentioned. Even the wayback machine might have a snapshot of the forum, but not the threads made them, and not the posts made within those threads.
i started joining forums in late 2000s when i was in CC, those were og"reddit" sites before i migrated to Y’Answers, then to reddit after that.
I’m wondering if any BBS posts I made way, way back when are on any drives anywhere. I’m sure it’s possible. I’m pretty sure the USENET posts I made back in the day started to get archived by Google (at least) and I’m pretty they will be around for quite some time.
Proprietary things built and run by private tyrannies using no standard protocol (like NNTP or ActivityPub) I don’t give much of a chance…
I made BBS posts in the early-mid 90s. They don’t exist anymore, because at that time the only BBSes I had any access to were local guys running one off a personal computer (and as such weren’t even available 24/7). The DMs and chats that happened there? If those guys actually kept the logs and kept transferring them from HD to HD, then I’ll be damned… but chances are likely they have disappeared into the ether.
Same. Some of my friends ran BBSes back in the 80s in the fashion you talk about - at least one friend had parents who were comparatively rich/doting and had a second phone line (!) so one of them was up quite often. I think he ran his from a C64.
Sadly, I could not afford a modem at the time - and my parents were not too keen on the idea anyway, because they assumed I’d be running up big bills. I didn’t have any access to a HD until late 1989 and that was all of 20MB (Mac SE). I didn’t get into BBSes until 1991 because I finally had a modem and a phone line…