“That’d be like losing my journals and photo albums, letters from friends, scrapbooks, keepsakes, and things like that to a house fire.”Īs we build the next era of the web, proponents of decentralized, communally created and owned spaces would be well served to take a page out of the AO3’s book. “I’m constantly terrified that Automattic will suddenly decide Tumblr’s not worth it and shut it down overnight, and my past 11 years on the site will be erased in the flip of a switch,” she says. From the slow, occasionally chaotic decline of Twitter to the ever-expanding detritus left behind from earlier eras of the web, the connections we make online and the places where we put our creations can feel ephemeral, subject to the whims of corporations or ultrarich individuals.Įven with her affairs in order on the AO3, Carpenter feels this acutely in the rest of her digital life. This stands in contrast to the increasingly precarious feel of a lot of our digital platforms. Both features create a sense of the platform as a communally constructed space-one that’s built to outlast any individual. Orphaning is an act of permanence on a web full of broken links and abandoned profiles, deliberately putting the work in the hands of the Archive itself. Nearly half a million of the site’s 10-million-plus works have been “ orphaned,” remaining online but severed from the account that posted them. Everyone had thought about it at least once that year, and it was a small relief to know my existence on the Archive would be handled by someone I trusted.”įNOK arrangements are one of several ways AO3 users’ creations can be preserved independently of the user. “For me, it helped make the conversation easier to bring up. “ Covid-19 seemed to have put that possibility at the forefront of everyone’s minds,” she says. Smith herself created one when she joined the FNOK team in 2020-a year that saw a significant increase in requests. But, she adds, “I think the majority of our users will never decide to set one up.” “We hope that an FNOK arrangement is something users take seriously, that both people in an arrangement trust each other a lot and have talked about the possible future of becoming incapacitated together,” Smith says. Though FNOK set-up is straightforward, only a small fraction of the site’s millions of users have put one in place. TikTok, arguably the biggest well of content creation on the web in 2023, has no publicly-listed postmortem policies at all. Regardless of ownership, that content usually remains untouched, if it stays online at all one notable exception is Twitch, where the people running a streamer’s account can keep posting for them after they die. In most sites’ terms of service, an individual holds the copyright to their content while licensing the platform to use it when a person dies, that copyright passes to their heirs, just like with any other type of media. Most platforms have little to say about the content created by the deceased-perhaps because most platforms are in the business of signing up and retaining users, not preserving the things those users have created. The things you’ve bought or earned online can’t be passed on after death-on a gaming platform like Steam, for example, you are licensing the right to use the software, and that right is non-transferable. Some platforms, notably Facebook and Instagram, allow non-family members to “memorialize” a profile Facebook now also permits users to designate a “ legacy contact” who can do things like change their profile photo or put up a remembrance post after they’ve died. Generally, that just means taking a profile down, since most platforms will not grant access to anyone but the user. It’s now common practice to leave a “social media will” with login information and postmortem wishes, but without one, immediate family members or people legally designated to act on behalf of an estate are often the only ones who can control a deceased user’s online accounts.
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