Pictured: An archive preventing another archive to do archiving
This is a bad idea. This is a monumentally bad idea, not to mention ever slightly sinister. I can go through all the reasons why AO3 might have done this, but they all falter before the central fact of fandom archiving, which is that fandom archiving is hard enough right now. Do the people who made this decision even remember when we lost entire fandoms? I thought this was the same group of people who distrust website owners who like to make on-the-fly, by-the-seat bloodless business decisions that destroy communities and fandoms overnight.
Because this is asking all of us to trust AO3 a whole lot, okay? This is asking us to trust a single point of failure, and even if we decided to invest our life savings in the good intentions of the folks at AO3, that much trust–AO3 could still fail. There are many many ways an organization like AO3 could fail; the fact that all of their money is in a Paypal account, for example.
Think about what happens if AO3 fails. Then we would truly have no backups or fail-safes, so we must do all that we can to ensure AO3 does not fail. Donations. Volunteering. The near-deification of AO3 that we already have right now that prevents us from being critical of what it’s doing. I don’t even believe that this was the purpose of this decision at AO3, but this is the consequence, intended or not.
Being an archive doesn’t mean being a single, monopolistic archive. It means that you do all that you can to facilitate archiving. And this is the opposite of that.
AO3/OTW have been trying to contact the Internet Archive team repeatedly for the past couple of months, and haven’t heard back. We have no idea what’s wrong, but it’s nothing on our end /o\ The AO3 definitely wants to be archived! You’re very welcome to contact them as well—please ask them to look into this, too!
Signal boosting since it’s sadly common for people to assume these things without contacting AO3/OTW first for answers.
Thanks Christy for the feedback! I’m glad to know it’s not anything on the AO3 end.
The larger consequence, which I was trying to get at, is that this now makes AO3 the single-point-of-failure. It’s an important development, whether or not it is of AO3′s doing. It also demonstrates the power of the Internet Archive, but the Internet Archive at least has a public API. It was a semi-public, semi-open long lasting institution that now apparently does not seem as public and open anymore.
The point, as it should always have been, is that we see a problem. What do we do about it?
**As for something that does not matter as much: I didn’t contact AO3 because I’m not a journalist? I made a post about something and it got cleared up, got a bunch of people fired up, and more people are now aware of the it. Let’s direct our energy to getting a response from the Internet Archive, because currently as I can see the problem persists.
Yep. And if bugging the Internet Archive doesn’t work–or even if it does–it’s a good idea to tell friends what you want done with your fannish stuff when you die, post your fics multiple places, create backups of things you like from AO3, etc. Archiving is not a one-and-done thing: redundancy is key.
Purely for AO3, there is the “fannish next of kin” system, where your FNOK can contact AO3 any time to gain control of your account. (So pick someone you trust to not falsely report your death.) Outside of AO3, it’s still good to have someone who can take over your accounts or nab your zine collection before your family arrives to be confused by your porn and throw your geeky stuff in the trash.
I want my friends to print out copies of my fic and put a copy of my vids onto a flash drive into the urn along with my ashes and shoot me into space.
