Nintendo's wonderful Miiverse has been preserved for posterity by enterprising internet archivists

Nintendo's beloved, but sadly now defunct, Miiverse social media service has been archived and put online in searchable form by a group of enterprising internet archivists.

Archive Team (a "loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage"), lead by Twitter user Drastic Actions, started the Miiverse project last September, not long after Nintendo announced that it would shut down the service on November 8th. By the time that Miiverse finally closed its doors, more than 133 million posts, drawings, and screenshots had been salvaged for posterity.

All that content - totalling 17 terabytes of data - has now been given a new lease of life in the form of Archiverse, a fully searchable archive featuring 133,003,599 posts, 216,901,986 replies, 75,955,135 screenshots, 72,135,190 drawings, 30,600,505 avatars, 8,278,693 user profiles, 2,238,830 deleted and hidden Posts, and 5,128 game communities. All territories, and even delisted communities - such as Nintendo's own E3 hubs - are accounted for.

Despite the impressive numbers involved, Archiverse sadly isn't a complete collection of Miiverse activity. As the website explains, "Archiverse represents everything Archive Team grabbed during the Miiverse shutdown. While we attempted to download and store as much as possible, given the amount of time to do the archive and the crawling we had to do to get what we ended up with, there is no way to know precisely how much we missed.

"From Miiverse administrators deleting users and posts, users who hid their profiles, new communities created after the shutdown notice went out, to stability issues with Miiverse itself, many things would stop a complete archive of the site."

As Archive Team points out, only Nintendo has access to the complete collection of Miiverse databases and assets, and it would need to donate them to make Archiverse genuinely complete. Is that something the company might be willing to do in order to preserve the legacy of its much-missed social media service? Only Nintendo knows for sure, but we (and other admirers of Miiverse's top-quality nonsense) can live in hope.