On November 7, another piece of Nintendo's short online history will go away forever. That's when Miiverse, the artwork and message sharing service embedded into many Wii U games, will be shutting down because, as Nintendo puts it, "among other reasons, many users are shifting to social networking services." While users can request an archive of their own Miiverse posts and drawings, the millions of memes, bad jokes, incisive game criticism, and more currently hosted on Miiverse will be removed from Nintendo's public servers in a few months (some features of certain Wii U games will also be impacted, as detailed in this FAQ).

That massive purge of player-created data wasn't acceptable to professional Web developer Tim Miller. Shortly after Nintendo announced the Miiverse shutdown last week, Miller started up an effort to permanently archive the network's public contents, complete with a GitHub page and the support of the Web preservationists at Archive Team.

"Any time a social network goes down, we lose a ton of data," Miller told Ars in an IRC chat. "Part of history, our culture, is lost. In Miiverse, especially in the art section, you can see people really investing a lot of their time and energy in it. And being able to save that for others to see and experience is extremely important.

"Just look at the people still making Splatoon art, right now, even though it's going away in a few months," he continued. "It's clear some people out there care about it, and preserving this data would be [a] great thing for all. It's important to remember that, when you give your data to companies like this, they can just as easily throw it away. And with that, so goes years of history."

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wonderful103 said:

Good on them. Likely the last ever video game device with a resistive screen capable of that level of detail.

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prag16 said:

Still can't fathom Nintendo ending Miiverse (including not putting it on Switch).

The people that would give a shit about my gaming garbage don't look at my twitter/facebook/etc.

The people that look at my twitter/facebook/etc don't give a shit about my gaming garbage.

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Madao said:

i see it as Nintendo saving costs over everything else.

it's much cheaper to make poeple use FB/Twitter than maintaining their own version of that.

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Phoenix RISING said:

Will Mario Maker still work?

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Madao said:

it's much cheaper to make poeple use FB/Twitter than maintaining their own version of that.

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