My highlights:
After two or three years of decline, Orkut had become a ghost town, considered to be in a vegetative state, almost dead due to the abandonment of the user base that had migrated en masse to Facebook. Google chose death by official ending, rather than pay for the ongoing maintenance of a neglected space.
Orkut’s death protocols were shared with the user base: three months of use, three months to export their photos to Google+, two years to export their data, if they did not want to appear in the community archive, they needed to permanently delete their Orkut profile.
With the end of Orkut anad the deletion of their profiles, Orkut’s users faced the responsibility of memory-keeping.
Making decisions on what stays and what does. We are encouraged not to delete, but rather to amass storage space. Many took the Orkut announcement as an opportunity to revisit their mostly abandoned) profiles and make a selection.
Google and the user base understood that the most important thing abut Orkut were the collective spaces of interaction, the communities, which gathered people from different regions through mutualities ,through shared humor and interests. People, known and unknown, got together, talked, joked, forged friendships. Those unlikely social interactions–which obviously also included spam, hate speech, harassment, trolling–were the jewel of Orkut.
Google maintained the Orkut community archive for just over two years. In 20017, the archive was deactivated, changing the memory-keeping of these Orkut-based interactions from centralized, corporate custody to decentralized, in which different people, in a more-or-less organized way, recorded what they had fund interesting. Google announced it only two weeks in advance and presented no offloading options.
Two years earlier Google had declared the community archive was for “eternity” and executed a careful protocol of deactivating a living thing, the memorial of that living thing they created was given a rushed ending. Orkut had a good death–its archive had a bad one.
Born-digital artifacts are notoriously difficult to preserve in the long-term in the continuous battle against obsolescence and changing technology. Digital objects are tied to infrastructural dependencies, both soft and hard.
Orkut’s memory lives on, even without material proof: in informal conversations people still fondly remember their interactions on Orkut, some of the communities they were a part of, and shared moments that took place there. The afterlife’s afterlife is memorialized in the Internet Archive, where it can still be fund with a little effort.