ATTN content creators: Here’s today’s illustration that when you use free services you are at their mercy of their bean counters.
If you are a musician, video gamer, or other performer who has live-streamed on Facebook to present your work and assumed that Meta would archive it forever, you are now officially screwed.
Meta’s official information about this drastic change contains no explanation of WHY they are doing this, as far as I can tell. But one must only assume that a bean-counting executive decided there’d be no more free ride. The only surprising thing about this change is that Meta seems to have NOT provided a way to preserve older live-streams through some enormous cost to the content creators.
Perhaps archive . org can pick up the slack?
E.g., I assume that the hundreds of live shows that Meredith Axelrod and Craig Ventresco live-streamed and stored on Facebook will be summarily deleted on May 22st. If this is the case, it will make inaccessible a treasure trove of live musical performance and a valuable record of musicians’ response to the pandemic.
Crappy Software 