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Digital platforms, no matter how popular or seemingly permanent, are not immune to shutting down or becoming obsolete. Instagram, for example, holds countless personal memories, creative works, and moments of history. If it were to shut down, much of that content could be lost if users don’t proactively save it elsewhere.
This issue isn’t unique to Instagram; platforms like MySpace, Vine, or Google+ show how fleeting digital spaces can be. MySpace famously lost millions of songs and files during a server migration, erasing a decade of content. This highlights how dependent we are on platforms to act as digital archives—but those archives are fragile.