The hottest Digital Archives Substack posts right now

A lot of important online material—like videos, photos, and archives that document war crimes, police violence, and activism—is being deleted, so our digital record is disappearing.
Big tech platforms and governments are increasingly censoring content that challenges mainstream or official narratives, making the erasure systematic and widespread.
Right-wing media outlets and influencers often accept bribes or dark money for favorable coverage, which further distorts the information people see online.

Powerful AI tools are letting people rapidly finish long-stalled, legacy projects — paying off “intention debt” and creating a new experience of being unstuck.
As people turn past work into websites, books, and personalized models they are building ‘archival selves’ — curated, partly fixed versions of their past that can be therapeutic or painfully exposing, and that trade off the ability to rewrite history for a clearer orientation.
Once backlogs are cleared many will face blank canvases, and what follows depends on how archives are framed: poorly done archiving will produce bland, mimetic projects, while creative editorial choices can make archives a generative springboard for diverse futures.

PressGuessr is a game that asks players to guess the publication year of Indian Express front pages using visual and textual clues.
The dataset has over 13,000 front pages from 1932–2025 gathered from Google News Archive and PressReader, with publication dates programmatically blurred and many modern full-page ads removed.
Building the game was enjoyable and it’s more challenging to play than expected, and you can try it at pressguessr.com.

Many homecooked apps created for specific personal desires and rituals
Desire for better tools to make, curate, and maintain small data collections
Experimentation with creating unique digital spaces for personal use and social interactions

The search for a forgotten flavor of chips led to a journey through old blogs, archives, and random discoveries.
Discovering the missing flavor brought a mix of nostalgia, satisfaction, and the joy of finally solving a mystery.
Unintended discoveries like old marketing strategies and technologies enlivened the search experience, making it more than just finding a chip flavor.

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