If Twitter Goes Down in Flames, What Happens to Its Collection of Tweets?

This is an increasingly pressing concern with any hosted content platform, commercial or otherwise.

Glynn Moody is among those who've already been through this rodeo on Google+ (as was I). A fair portion of that content was preserve through the work of the Archive Team (which works with, though is independent of, the Internet Archive). Libraries can preserve such content.

As someone active on Mastodon (and having seen several instances there go down), I'm of mixed minds of preservation vs. desertation. I do see the value in preserving some content, though not all, though the process of curation is a challenging one, especially in the time-crunch of a shutdown announced with little lead time, on a service whose reliability is already declining and whose operators may be opposed to archival efforts. That last is not uncommon, and was one of the challenges encountered in the G+ shutdown, amongst others.

The legal issues Glynn addresses also deserve consideration, which should address both the interests of archivists and of those who would prefer to see their content die with a given platform. I've made some abortive efforts to discuss this with organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, without much progress to date (far more my own fault than theirs).

For a while, the Library of Congress was archiving all of Twitter. They stopped a while back because the volume was so high and the value was so low.

The overwhelming majority of tweets are probably hot takes, food photos or arguments. While they might be interesting to sociologists in the future, looking at the tone and conversation in aggregate, some things should just be allowed to wither away.

There are certainly things I believed in 2009 when I got my first Twitter account which I don't believe now. People change over time, and perhaps everyone's tweets going away forever might be a step in the right direction.

Some notable people or notable tweets might be worth keeping, but the overwhelming majority will be utterly pointless, irrelevant, or trivial.

NB: Title shortened from "If Twitter Goes Down In Flames, What Happens To Its Huge And Historically Important Collection Of Tweets?".