Look guys, Amino sucks. I know this, you know this (assuming you've used the platform before) and everyone else who's ever used the platform before knows this too. With the recent shutdown of Amino, I could only ponder: is it all just gone now? Have we lost this part of the internet completely? That was, until I remembered the project I had been working on for 3 years – archiving Amino. Please join me on this journey as I tell you how we got here.
You might ask: how did we get here in the first place? What even is Amino? And what's my connection to it?
Basically: Amino is was a social media platform where teens were trusted to run and moderate subcommunities about anything you can think of, with the occasional grooming sprinkled in. Basically: reddit with the modern customizability and chatting functionality of discord and more!! Quizzes, Photo Albums, if you can think of a feature for a social media app, Amino probably had it – in a lot of cases, even before a lot of social media platforms have started using it themselves.
I started using Amino in 2018, started contributing to a python library for amino in 2019-2020, got employed for Amino in 2021 and then left in late 2022. I've written a huge draft that goes into my employment at MediaLab and how it wasn't really... good nor lawful, but that's neither here nor there for now.
After my tenure I've started to use the platform less and less but one thing was always certain for me: if Amino were to disappear, I would be extremely sad to go out empty handed. So in 2023 I started working on an archival tool for Amino, which had matured in 2024 where I had started renting servers to run it on, as well as using my own hardware for running the tools in parallel with a selfhosted database cluster which I had to maintain. In total, I spent over 800€ during the runtime of this project to scrape amino as much as I could. Leading me to a database with about 30 million records
Developing that archival tool, was a huge pain. Not due to ratelimiting or platform security but due to the lack thereof. Lacking consistency in response schemas, exploits allowing to upload arbitrary data, malformed JSON Objects and everything you can think of. Every time the tool hung, I would notice days later because I couldn't be bothered to actually add good monitoring and had to patch out all of the mistakes Amino had made. That is also why I decided to use MongoDB for this project. SQL is great for sure but if the schemas aren't consistent anywhere then uh... Where do you even go from there? To me it was more important to get as much as quickly as I could instead of wasting precious time creating schemas.
The problems didn't just end at bad design on Amino's end though. The main problem for me was: how do I find a list of all major communities? There was no way to enumerate every community on Amino besides trying to iterate over every single possible community id or stalking their sitemap.xml (I ended up doing a mix of both) which were both suboptimal as that led to including a bunch of small and or private and or deleted communities which due to lacking security were completely accessible by the API.
I decided to archive those but strip them from any public release, should I ever make one. I made a different choice in favor of privacy regarding chats. I like archiving, yes, but a lot of chats contained extremely private information which would be impossible for me to filter out. Despite the value of archiving them, I made the conscious decision of leaving chat logs as well as photo albums out of the archive and only retaining sparse chat room metadata, if at all.
Going on a small tangent here, but, did you know that private chats aren't actually private on Amino? As with private communities, private chats can be accessed solely if the chat id is known! No auth needed! It's kinda stupid that this works but hell, what do I know.
That leads us to today. Amino has now "officially" shut down. I'm using air quotes here, because there was no official statement, subscriptions weren't cancelled automatically and had to be refunded and stopped manually, there is no way to make GDPR requests anymore and a bunch of other stuff that is outright unlawful. The only thing that remains up is the image servers which are purely AWS S3 wrappers.
So, instead of archiving blogs etc. Let's set out on a different journey. Changing the scope from gigabytes to terabytes!
Since I don't have the storage necessary myself, I reached out to archiveteam as well a friend who will help me download what we can from the static media in order to bring amino back from the dead once more. Couple that archive with a project of mine (self hostable amino private server) and one day you'll have a fully functional archive of amino browsable in the app itself.
So consider this as a teaser for a larger project yet to come! Be prepared for Aminoid!
Also note that in the title I said archiving an entire platform, that is a massive overstatement I archived a big portion but not literally the entirety.
