What happens when a Twitter/X account is suspended or lost? I was recently going through my saved art by other artists, and checked X to see if they had made anything new. (The last piece of art I had saved by them is from 2023 July 1.) I saw that their account had been suspended, probably in August this year (2024), and they have no other online presences other than a Galleria profile with three very old works.
When it comes to personal websites, I’m used to this happening—I have very old Japanese art webcircles saved and archived, and it’s very easy to use the
Wayback Machine to crawl and archive entire websites. But with Twitter/X? Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
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Instagram, Facebook, and Discord are also causes of concern to me. Instagram accounts are easily archived (there are browser extensions that can download the media on an IG profile), but Facebook Groups are full of information that is
not indexed on search engines and thus will never be found outside the walled garden of Facebook. (Not to mention the fact that Facebook Groups are a horrible communal repository of information… And often poorly organised by a handful of admins who’ve never used MediaWiki in their lives.) And Discord? Since overall text and multimedia discussion have moved from indexable forum websites to Discord’s own walled garden, that’s a mass of cultural and technical information that not only is hard to search through, but at the risk of loss (hacked accounts/servers). Think of all the video game-related discussions that used to take place on fan forums or GameFaqs, and all the technical discussions that have moved to Discord. Stack Overflow still serves as a great programmer’s Q&A platform, but the equivalent doesn’t exist for increasingly dormant automobile forums, and other forums for other niche interests.
What other lost media, or potentially lost media, are you concerned about or have found?
