Yahoo Groups is shutting down.

Wow. The history of a lot of great early online communities is about to be erased from the web.

@adders This is one of the least surprising pieces of news I've seen this year. If anybody cares about, well, anything they chose to host on Yahoo then they should have made backups a very long time ago.

@simonwoods Is there any way of backing up the conversations easily, though?

@adders I have no idea! However, even from a distance it's been fairly obvious that it's highly unlikely Yahoo has not cared about such things.

Like, if you care enough to get angry then you go ahead and manually copy-paste. We're never going to make better web companies if we keep naively assuming in what amounts to fairytales.

@adders I agree it's bad and they're all bad. I'm just past the point of focusing on that. It's time for us all to focus on the solutions moving forward, by caring more about groups like Internet Archive, people like Manton introducing features like auto-sync with the Wayback Machine, and if we're talking about backing up how about the Archive Team?

Let's remember the damage but be careful to focus too much of our energy on outrage at the damage, even if the actions of these people have been outrageous.

@simonwoods looks like they have the tools but haven’t started actively backing up yet. I find things like this hard to let go of - I’m one of life’s natural archivers. It’s why I’m busy scanning all my late parents’ negatives.

@adders Oh, I'm with you, very much of the same mind. With that mindset, however, I am becoming much more interested in discussing these events after some time has passed; with this particular case I would look to make stronger assessments of the people who have made decisions at Yahoo, utilising the context of a longer time period. Obviously it's possible to do both, I'm just concerned that too much energy gets used up in the short term knee-jerk reaction and not enough is left to support the better alternatives.