Miiverse is dying. It had a long life as the primary social hub for Nintendo’s 3DS and Wii U systems, where players could use the touch functionality on both to draw and share memes, silly doodles, fan art, and countless in-jokes. On November 7, all of that will be wiped away as Nintendo shutters the community portal for good.
While it’s a bummer to see any digital community wiped out — and a little bizarre when you start pondering what this means for the ephemerality of digital life — the Miiverse community has been particularly distraught because of the sheer investment so many have put into it. A standard message board this is not.
Even a day after launch, the platform had already seen some phenomenal art. Miiverse posts ranged from a detailed sketch of Majora’s Mask Deku Link to loads of hilarious squid-centric memes for Splatoon 2.
A few enterprising engineers have set out to try and archive the whole thing before it gets wiped in two months, but if you are keen on keeping your own content, there is, thankfully, a pretty straightforward solution. Nintendo is allowing users to submit a request for copies of their posts. If you linked your Nintendo ID with your Miiverse account, you can request a copy of your data. Here is how to do it.
Getting your posts from Nintendo
Step 1: Go to the Miiverse site and select, Request Miiverse post history.
Step 2: Hit “Request Post History” before the system shuts down on November 7.
Step 3: If you follow those instructions and your posts don’t violate community guidelines, you will receive an email with a “few weeks” detailing next steps, according to Nintendo’s official support site. Ultimately, you will receive a URL that will allow you to download a Zip file with your Miiverse posts. According to Nintendo, the file must be downloaded onto a PC, not a smart device.
Recovering files with The Archive Team (Requires coding)
If that is just not enough, or if you want to help archive the whole kit and caboodle, you can help developer Tim Miller and the folks at Archive Team. They have set out to create a set of basic tools to help automate the grunt work of trawling millions and millions of posts and then storing them. This will take quite a bit more technical know-how, but you could be one of the few that steps up to save a piece of digital heritage.
To get involved, head over to the MiiWorse IRC and/or Miller’s Github page and, if you have the skills, help convert the code that is there into a simple tool. From there, users will be able to crowdsource help and, hopefully, get enough folks on board and pulling data from the service to have it all backed up.
The good news is that almost all of the posts on Miiverse are currently set to public (and you can view most of them from your browser), so this is neither illegal nor does it circumvent any of Nintendo or the community’s privacy rules or settings.
Once an automated tool is available, we will update this post to provide step-by-step instructions for those wanting to help the project.
