It’s a good thing George recently wrote about alternatives to Storify, because the service has announced that as of May 16, 2018, Storify will no longer exist. Fortunately, instructions for exporting content from Storify are given in their “end of life” announcement (Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a way to bulk export all of your stories):
- Log in to Storify at www.storify.com.
- Mouse over the story that contains content you would like to export and select “View.”
- Click on the ellipses icon and select “Export.”
- Choose your preferred format for download.
- To save your content and linked assets in HTML, select - File > Save as > Web Page, Complete.
- Repeat the process for each story whose content you would like to preserve.
Ian Milligan has just published a thoughtful reflection titled “The Death of Storify, Difficult Alternatives, and the Need to Steward Our Data Responsibly":
The first hot take is that it underscores how when we spoke about “archiving” a hashtag on Storify, we weren’t really doing anything resembling that term. We were temporarily parking it on a free site until it inevitably closed.
The second big point, to me, is to use this as an opportunity around how we could move forward as a field.
I’ve used Storify extensively, particularly as a presentation tool, to integrate online resources into my talks, easily shareable, complete with links. With 50 stories on the platform, I have some decisions to make - I can export all of them as HTML, for example, and host them on my own domain, but I’m not entirely sure that I want all 50 stories on my website (or subdomain, I guess).
But like so many platforms that came before (RIP Vine, most recently), when we rely on outside providers to help us curate, preserve, and share our digital traces and work, we often get burned once they are shuttered in the name of consolidation (or profitability or whatever).
What will you do with your Storify stories? What will you use instead?
[Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash]
