Josie Stewart

I should know better by now. I was getting to know someone new on Facebook, and I did that thing where I started typing a long comment and then looked away for a second and it was gone. So frustrated with myself for not starting that comment in a separate app.

But it got me thinking about how low the bar is for accessibility in Big Tech. We have these big polished sites that take years of work and the skilled labor of many designers to build, and something as small as drafting comments in a way that can't get whisked away by a refresh is left unaddressed for years and we just accept it.

That isn't to say this is the worst manifestation of this problem, but it got me thinking about our ownership of the writing (or video or pictures) we share on these platforms and how casually we accept some anonymous third party's control over its survival. It shouldn't be this way.

When I was at the Computer History Museum this summer, I took a picture of a relic that stood out to me. It was an early (1975) computer kiosk called Community Memory. A device for preserving publicly accessible information for the community. The Internet and later the Web started as a way for us to network community ideas from one community node to another, not only sharing but also preserving them.

We have this idea that everything on the Internet is forever. It's really not though. What we do have is a system where whether our content persists or not is entirely up to people we don't know who don't have our best interest in heart. Local storage is a partial solution to this, but how many of you have the capacity to handle your personal data like an archivist?

Not everything should be forever. In an existential sense, nothing really can be and that's ok, but there are things at the community level that we should preserve. We shouldn't surrender all our efforts to share knowledge and beauty with each other to the void.

This blog is my attempt to start taking back control of my writing online. The Shiver software solutions are Blue Shark Friends's attempts to make preservation sustainable. Digital archives like the Internet Archive are great, but they are ultimately just another place where data is housed outside your community. We can't preserve what's important to us alone, but working together as a community, we can make a tangible difference in what lasts.

Published: 2025-11-08_182220