With Mastodon on the Rise, Who Archives the Digital Public Square?

With Mastodon on the Rise, Who Archives the Digital Public Square?

DALL*E prompt: photorealistic waves of twitter logos and mastodon logos crashing onto a sandy beach
Much has been made about the differences between Twitter and Mastodon: the challenge of finding a home for your account (and the corresponding differences between your “local” timeline and your “global” timeline), the intentional antiviral design choices (no quote-tweets and a narrow search system), and the more-empowering block and mute features.
A recent article in
MIT Technology Review
about
the potential loss to history if Twitter goes away
had me thinking of another one difference: a Mastodon-filled world changes expectations for archiving this kind of primary source material.
Think Bigger Than Mastodon
Let’s set some common ground.
»
Mastodon
» is being used here as a shortcut for the growing federation of servers that follow the ActivityPub protocol—the «fediverse».
Most people caught up in the migration away from Twitter are looking for a «Twitter-equivalent», and the option that has caught the popular imagination is Mastodon.
As we view the fediverse digital public square, we could just as well be talking about Mastodon forks like
Hometown
.
We should also include in the genre-specific ActivityPub software like
Pixelfed
(for photographers,
me there
),
Bookwyrm
(for book groups and reader commentary,
me there
),
Funkwhale
(for music), and
write.as
(for long-form articles).
Although Mastodon is getting the most traction right now, the question of archiving the digital public square is bigger than just Mastodon…just keep that in mind as you read below.
Twitter Archiving Challenges
As the
MIT Technology Review
article points out, there are challenges to archiving Twitter.
For eight years, the US Library of Congress took it upon itself to maintain a public record of all tweets, but it stopped in 2018, instead selecting only a small number of accounts’ posts to capture. “It never, ever worked,” says William Kilbride, executive director of the Digital Preservation Coalition. The data the library was expected to store was too vast, the volume coming out of the firehose too great. “Let me put that in context: it’s the Library of Congress. They had some of the best expertise on this topic. If the Library of Congress can’t do it, that tells you something quite important,” he says.
The challenges include that of scale:
[In January 2013] We now have an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets and growing. The volume of tweets the Library receives each day has grown from 140 million beginning in February 2011 to nearly half a billion tweets each day as of October 2012.
–
Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress
, Library of Congress blog, January 2013.
And also of scope—the Library does not receive the multimedia parts of tweets.
As the
whitepaper attached to the Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress
says:
The Library only receive…