#mcyt is the library of alexandria

[blocksruinedme]

Help a vod archivist out!

i have an oli orionsound vods channel, because he has 14 total on his channel and hasn't put one up in 5 months. Youtube has blocked me from uploading any more for 24 hours cause i'm not cool enough. i don't feel like giving youtube my face or ID to be allowed to upload more videos a day, so i need channel engagement to prove i'm real.

if people could leave some likes and comments or i guess subscribe, that would be swell.

[edit: if you leave a comment saying who appears in a vod, or any notable events, i'll put it in the description. community archivism! Is that a word?]

[edit 2: Look for vods, and please upload vods, at https://archive.org/ A bunch of the ones I'm uploading came from there]

[irrealisms]

i've seen a lot of people talk about mcyt as a constantly burning library of alexandria recently, and to some extent that's true. people are constantly deleting their blogs, going scorched earth with animatics, fanfics, etc., that they made. but i've also seen people (three in the last few days!) make this claim about VODs, when talking about large fandoms like DSMP and QSMP, and.... guys. that was true in 2020. that's not true anymore. archivists have been working tirelessly for years now to make sure that isn't true.

the dsmp VOD masterlist is here. in november 2020, it's missing 16 VODs, if i am counting correctly--which is still a fairly small minority, but it's a lot, and it sucks!--but in november of 2021, it's missing one, and that's because the cc of that VOD does copyright takedowns, not because the archivists didn't save it. no one in the archivist project is deleting VODs off youtube with no backups the way people are deleting fanfics. three months ago, one of my dsmp archivist friends finished coding a tool that let them reconstruct VODs out of twitch clips, and reconstructed six tubbo dsmp VODs from 2020. not only are we basically not losing VODs anymore, we are actively gaining VODs that have been lost for years, that were thought to be lost forever. the library isn't burning anymore; it's being rebuilt.

the qsmp VOD masterlist is here. it is usually a month or two behind the present day, to give creators time to archive their own VODs, but... look at it. in january of 2024, every single qsmp vod was archived. the same is true of december of 2023, and november, and the vast majority of months for the past year.

i'm not going to say that there isn't a problem. just a few days ago, i realized that a lifesteal VOD from last year was missing--that its youtube upload was messed up somehow, and no one noticed and it wasn't mirrored on the internet archive and the person who uploaded it deleted the original file. and now it's gone forever. this made me super sad! like i said: i'm not going to say that there isn't a problem.

but... look at the lifesteal VOD masterlist here. lifesteal's a smaller fandom than qsmp or dsmp. open the 2022 tab and you'll see months and months of lost VODs, of no one's VODs being saved, because there weren't any archivists saving them. then open the 2023 tab and see: they lost four VODs, over the course of a year. even in smaller fandoms, archivists are working. they're making progress. they're saving VODs. in 2024, lifesteal archivists screenrecorded five streams on tumblr live to make sure they would not become lost media. mcyt may be a constantly burning library of alexandria, but the people with fire extinguishers are dedicated. they're making incredible progress. i know people with petabytes of VODs saved, who have spent money on extra storage for this. i know people who are constantly running up against their storage limits as they download/upload to the internet archive/delete for space/rinse and repeat. a decent fraction of the time, my internet at home is slow because it's downloading VODs.

and these aren't the only mcyt fandoms with archiving projects! the outsiders smp VOD masterlist is here. origins smp VOD masterlist is here. smp earth VOD masterlist is here. rats smp VOD masterlist is here. there are so many others that i just don't happen to know about. the older and smaller a fandom is, the more likely it is to not have an attached archiving project, or for the archive to be missing a lot of VODs. but... guys, we've saved a lot. there are people out there, working tirelessly to save even more. yes, mourn what we have lost--the archivists i know are also the ones mourning the most for the VODs that are, in fact, forever lost media. but don't dismiss how much people have saved. we are making progress. we are losing less and less every month. the vast majority of the dsmp and qsmp still exist, i am not going to say they're the same experience as watching live because they're really not, but.. they're out there. people have put in a lot of work to save them.

if you have publicly available VOD masterlists or other mcyt archiving projects that aren't on this post, please add them in a reblog. i want this post to serve as a reference for how much archivists have saved in this community; unfortunately, i'm not super connected to every community. but i know that--for every person deleting things, there are people working, tirelessly & with little external reward, in so many different mcyt fandoms, to save things. and we should appreciate that more often.

[metfell]

mcyt is a constantly burning library of alexandria i am so serious

[splatattackz]

sometimes i think about the "mcyt is like a constantly burning library of alexandria" and i just go. yeah.

im always reminded of fits qsmp vods too. because for a long time, until like december last year, there was no like big archive of fits vods. none that was complete at least, besides fairys i think but even then it was spotty and there was a period of a month where all archiving of fits vods stopped. and then luckily the fitmc unofficial vod archive came into existence and now every single fitmc vod has been uploaded and its kept up to date. but i remember the sadness of looking for a fit vod archive and finding near nothing and idk its just interesting to think about.

remember to always archive some of your favorite things, whether it be vods or something else. everything deserves to be archived.

[strifesolution]

also listen i KNOW it’s been years now and i am all for ccs stepping away and doing what they want with their lives and career BUT ALSO, I’M STILL MAD AT ALEX PARVIS, goddammit you erased an entire part of mcyt history and YEAH it’s reuploaded but those original view counts and comments are still gone and now you can’t discover the series naturally you have to know the original existed!!! and you did all that to rebrand you channel and post ONE video in the three years since you wiped everything?? you could’ve at least continued to use it after but now it’s left to rot and that’s sad because all that hidden content people could benefit from seeing is collecting dust and FUCK why must mcyt be a continuously burning library of alexandria THE INTO ESSENTIA TRAILER IS STILL LOST MEDIA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[b1odeuwed]

being a sunship fan in the mcyt fandom is like having the library of alexandria in your backyard but people just don’t gaf

if u do want to get into it though may i recommend @girlboyzone’s website https://t.co/kd3xABuJ4C <3

[erstwhilesparrow]

I just saw that post you reblogged about archiving MCYT stuff - is there a particular reason stuff disappears so often? (That's very cool people are putting in so much effort to preserve it, though; big respect to that tbh)

reyni! :D okay i should be clear upfront that some of my information may be incomplete here because (1) i don't have twitter and (2) i'm not directly involved in any mcyt archival efforts. also putting this under a cut because it's long and i do need to reference recent events involving abuse and sexual assault:

despite mcyt = minecraft youtube(r), a lot of stuff relevant to mcyt happens like. exclusively on stream? really, really ~plot-critical or deeply characterizing stuff happens on stream sometimes and never makes it into a youtube video! and on twitch at least, unless you explicitly set it to save your vods, twitch will just delete them after a certain number of days. i don't know exactly how this works if you stream on youtube but also my impression is that a significant majority of people are not streaming on youtube anyway. since fairly early in my time in mcyt fandoms, there's been concern about creators not saving their own vods, and on top of that, sometimes you save a vod and it gets taken down anyway for copyright infringement (playing copyrighted music, the creator themself asked for it to be removed, etc). so like. as baseline, there's a sense of inherent ephemerality to the medium. that post i reblogged is explicitly pushing back against the description of mcyt vods as "a constantly burning library of alexandria," and in light of the evidence that follows i agree (and also am a little weepy about the efforts people make to save these things), but that sense doesn't come from nowhere, you know?

speaking of that post though, i suspect this archival stuff is coming up More now because it's been a rough couple of weeks in mcyt fandom. several really influential creators in the space were recently outed as being abusive or predatory in a way that's caught a lot of attention, and many people in response have been (understandably!) deleting their fanworks or otherwise distancing or removing themselves from mcyt fandom. i want to be clear, i know stuff gets deleted all the time in fanspaces -- the internet is kind of just Like That in terms of how easy it is to lose things -- and it's incredibly fair to go "no, even if there was a strong distinction between character and creator this leaves a sour taste in my mouth and i'm not doing this anymore." i don't want to pretend that no one has ever deleted a fanwork outside of mcyt spaces, and i don't want to insinuate that it's bad to vocally revoke your support of those creators -- those people have done awful things and generally failed to meaningfully apologize or take accountability, and it is worth remembering and saying so. but to give you a sense of numbers: antimony-medusa does monthly stats on mcyt fic on ao3, and dsmp, which even after it's kind of died off has seen monthly increases in the range of hundreds of new fic per month, saw a decrease of roughly 800 fics. other fandoms have similarly seen decreases, and video blogging rpf, which ao3 treats as an umbrella for basically all mcyt stuff, saw an increase of 51, as compared to last month's increase of (approximately) 3500. and that's just fic -- there's also a rich trove of animatics, fanvids, fanart, etc that i don't have any numbers for, but i've seen people talking about deleting those, too, you know? you see how people might be worried about what we are losing.

at this point i think your question is answered, but if you'll forgive some baseless speculation here, i wonder to what extent mcyt is also. complicated by how closely character and creator can sit? i don't know how other people feel, but there is a difference to me between "i've written fic about This Person Specifically (or, arguably, their streamer persona which may be somewhat divorced from the Real Life Human Being Behind The Screen)" and "i've written fic about a character this person plays." i dunno, there's a sense to me of the flimsiness of the line between creator and character and then also of the line between creator and fandom that i think makes it harder to be like "okay, i am doing my own thing, separate from the creator, so i'm going to keep my stuff public even if i don't stand by it 100% anymore." i remember when i first joined mcyt fandom, there was a period of time people were really worried that the creators were actively on ao3, or that fans would try to send their fanfic directly to the creators. i thought to myself, "well, if anyone Tries Shit with my work, i will simply delete all my relevant accounts and disappear." that's... not really a back-up plan that i feel good about these days, but. you know. it's been a thing, if not always for the same reasons, and i do understand the impulse.

[the-joju-experience]

I think a lot about the ten lost books about the Trojan War. We know about Achilles and Odysseus, but supposedly there were ten other volumes destroyed with the Library of Alexandria.

And then I think about how little I see people talking about Golden Age MCYT. I really wish I knew where to find more art from that era. It feels like the classics should be more common.

[clembian]

need 2 clear out my photos cos im running out of storage an i Know 50% of thst is 2020-2022 mcyt stuff.. my personal library of alexandria(⁠-⁠_⁠-⁠;⁠)

[aetherknit]

cant believe u left me for cuphead and pasta do not hit me up rn

(also niki and callahan for the ask game :3 🖤)

we played minecraft for 3 hours today u are so clingy

niki: which character made you angry at any point + why?

jeez i dont know that its often i get mad at characters. i got frustrated briefly with tommy when he betrayed techno way back before doomsday but i understand his motivations much better now. i think sam is probably one of the characters that aggravates me the most -- a marked lack of personal ambition is pretty rare on the smp and it can be a really aggravating trait to me lmao. i Hate a doormat

callahan: what are your favourite animations?

i have 315 videos in my mcyt-related animation youtube playlist BUT if im narrowing it down to dreamsmp only and im REALLY picky heres a few that come to mind

tick tock (c!dream)

how bad can i be? (schlatt & cabinet)

the old days (dream team) 

villains (general cast)

chaos (season 1)

villains -- the festival (wilbur and tommy)

for the ask meme