PASTA

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PASTA is an acronym/abbreviation for Publish Anywhere, Save To (private) Archive, the practice of automatically saving a copy of whatever you post on (social media) silos to someplace else under your own control, like a private directory on your own server, or a local folder on your laptop that is less vulnerable to site-death.

PASTA can be one way of building up a local export that eventually you can use to backfill to your own site.

PASTA is not syndication, so it is not just PESOS to a private archive. The archived copies of the post are not published, but only accessible for the owner of the archive. Thus, in case of a site-death, the public copy is still lost for other people.

PASTA also does not apply when storing information directly in an archive, like GPS logging or making private bookmarks, because the information was not public in the first place and has never been published.

IndieWeb Examples

Marty McGuire

Marty McGuire uses Camlistore as a personal archive for:

• posts from Twitter
• checkins from Swarm (and old checkins from Foursquare)
• bookmarks from Pinboard
• photos from Flickr

Camlistore provides importers that use each services' API to gather and store the post data for his main account on that service.

He also uses OwnYourSwarm to PESOS Swarm checkins, and often POSSEs his Twitter posts, but this archive ensures that he has a personal backup copy of these posts.

Chris Aldrich

Chris Aldrich keeps a variety of private posts (usually password protected) on the back end of his WordPress site as a personal archive for a variety of uses. As an example of a site-death causing an issue, he'd written an article for the AltPlatform.org site which closed down in 2017-12. Following the shutdown of AltPlatform, he was able to restore the public nature of the content by changing it from private to public on his personal site.

Peter Molnar

Peter Molnar saves copies of favoured, liked, bookmarked. etc content, either via:

• Wallabag (bookmarks)
• silo.PASTA, a set of Python scripts pulling faved & liked content from various silos (with some extra bits of magic)

Non-IndieWeb Examples

• https://github.com/pastpages/savemy.news

See Also

• POSSE
• PESOS
• backfill
• commonplace book
• archival copy
• export/import

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