Once the lifeblood of online creativity—from silly games to iconic animations—Flash has all but disappeared from the live web.

In our latest Vanishing Culture essay, free-range archivist Jason Scott explores why Flash deserves to be preserved, and how the Internet Archive is keeping it alive.

🔗 https://blog.archive.org/2025/08/06/vanishing-culture-why-preserve-flash/

🕳️ #VanishingCulture

tl;dr armies of idiots fell for the latest scam from Adobe even though they knew (they knew) that Adobe is basically the most horrible corporation ever, and now their hard work is completely useless, because they leashed themselves to a closed source, closed shop, highly obfuscated corporate system, instead of using SDL, which they also knew about.

My favorite one was Balto: the TRUE story.

@internetarchive any recommendations for running flash files some of us have saved to our hard drives over the years? my copy of gnash seems to work with everything i've saved but i also remember a few years ago giving up and deleting a bunch of stuff that it did *not* work on

and now i can't even get gnash to run

RE: https://kill-corporations.enterprises/objects/a557cc72-c251-449e-850e-0389ed5278bf

@apophis @internetarchive I have a copy of the last adobe flash player for Linux sitting around somewhere, would that suffice? Yes its non-free but I've never had it not work

@prettygood @internetarchive that may well work!