Thinking back over the Mordavia photos, they used to be posted on the Mordavia website. It was a great website - had everything I needed to know about the game, including a link straight to the forums, and it was nice to be able to see that photo archive. I went back to that website a little while ago, and the photos from the games were still there, just as accessible. However, there were no photos from some of the later games - the platform of choice changed somewhere along the way and the website didn’t keep up. Also, the website is gone now along with that archive.
Facebook is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. I mean, while social spaces on the net don’t change much over the decades [/sarcasm], Facebook appears to have gone to extra lengths to try and worm its way into many other internet structures. Maybe it will even last another decade, and if it can do that perhaps it can last even longer. However, Facebook does tend to lack temporal solidity, for what of a better term: it operates in bits and pieces of the here and now, and the past gets blurry quickly. If you don’t believe me, try deleting all your posts for a given month, and then hitting F5 - your just emptied month will fill with new data that you couldn’t see before. Took me about six iterations of that to delete all my content. On the whole, Facebook is not structured as an archive. Perhaps photos are an exception, however, as you can dump large quantities of them and they all appear to stay put on your photo wall (unlike your text posts).
Two concerns, though. One already mentioned is that non-facebookers (the few of us like myself), cannot see them without joining. This has the advantage on curtailing open access to this archive a little, but does so in a way that is only coincidentally beneficial to the community, and not completely so - people within the system can still see it regardless of whether we benefit from that or not.
The other is whether this archive will stay around. Sure, it seems pretty permanent now. So did all its predecessors, in their time. Will it still stay a functional archive for photos? It used to be that you could see every post you ever made on Facebook, but that is no longer true. We have no control over whether Facebook might one day decide to ‘streamline’ archived photos and just show the popular old ones to people. Indeed, as I understand it, the reason this group was created was because Facebook was failing as an archive for photos - having them dispersed over individual profiles was not working.
I would like to be able to come back in 10 years time and look through all the photos from old games. Facebook doesn’t even let me do that now, as a non-member. We already post a lot of photos to Facebook, and that will, as commented above, continue to happen. Its a tool we can and do use, but it was not built specifically for this purpose, and we have zero control over its future.
The issue for me is how do we ensure, decades from now, that we can still explore this history of ours with ease?