Sometimes I think about how much media will be forever lost in decades to come because everything is now on streaming platforms that delete things on a whim instead of physical media.
.@Gargron writes: "Sometimes I think about how much media will be forever lost in decades to come because everything is now on streaming platforms that delete things on a whim instead of physical media."
This is one of the reason that services like the Pirate Bay are so invaluable.
@Gargron I've owned and operated my own Plex server for several years now, but there's only so much I can justify spending on a personal archive here at home on hardware that I have to pay for and maintain. The death of physical media is sad, 😞 Hopefully somebody like the internet archive can do something about preservation, but I'm not going to hold my breath. My wife, who is a Doctor Who fan, says there are some episodes of Doctor Who that are just gone because they got overwritten.
@Gargron I'm afraid even data on physical media will be lost, unless it's text and images that can be viewed with the naked eye without the need for any technology. The Industrial Age will simply end in a huge collapse because we failed at becoming sustainable when it was easy (1970s-1980s), we even failed when it was hard, but still feasible (1990s-2000s), now all our efforts to become sustainable can only slow the decline if we're lucky. 300 years from now, everything stored on digital media will be gone. Everything printed on cheap mass-produced paper will be gone.
@Gargron
That's exactly what we are up to at https://digipres.club/, an instance devoted to digital preservation!! 😄
An example among many others, at the National library of France, we are step-by-step expanding the legal deposit to born-digital sound and video!
@Gargron It's a different sort of loss of media, previously the large risks were degrading physical media with vinegar syndrome and sticky shed syndrome along with bitrot, discrot and other terrible issues. Now if something is exclusively streaming only, then it's down to the whims of one company taking it away.
@Gargron It also reminds me of the music tracker communities like oink/pink/what... they used to have perfect copies of millions of albums with perfect metadata...
They were literal libraries of musical history... and they just got shut down
same as pubhub with science papers... archiving is a common good and we need to build places to store all media.
same same with game emulation.. we need to keep games playable past a generation.
@Gargron As for the "public" media you mentioned, I agree with you. And no one who resists this with their private NAS probably has a plan beyond their own death. There is no media collection that does not need to be actively maintained. Photos should be printed or developed. If you want to preserve audio recordings, it's best to have them cut into a vinyl record. So far, I don't know anything useful for videos.
@Gargron With the vast amounts of private media that we produce with our smartphones every day, we should only wish the best to the big tech companies, whose clouds will still spit out some of it decades from now, when our children's children wonder what their ancestors and their world used to look like.
@Gargron Yesterday, at my local library, I talked to one of the people who curate their movie collection, mostly DVD, and he said that they will phase out buying and offering physical media like DVD's in the upcoming three years. Another place that people can go to for physical media, instead of signing up for streaming services - sure, call me old-fashioned -, down the drain. And already I notice a lot of old movies have been removed from their catalogue.
@Gargron we currently subscribe to maybe half a dozen channels. I wanted to watch Casino - the Scorsese classic - and couldn't find it on any of the channels, and we lost the DVD a couple moves back.
Soon the physical media will be unavailable as whatever conglomerate will pull it from sale just so they can have sole streaming rights, but won't actually put it on streaming because it saves money not to.
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