We have grown accustomed to media formats and software used for born-digital art, literature, and games becoming obsolete, but when preservation methods and systems, themselves, become outmoded, it is difficult not to see it as highly ironic. Such is the case of Conifer, the Web archiving system that the lab had been using alongside Ruffle for keeping Flash works accessible to the public.
The announcement from Rhizome.org about the “twilight[ing]” of Conifer came on December 29, 2025. Since that date, we have busily been testing the 282 Flash works that we had preserved with Conifer to see if they could function effectively with Ruffle.
Some back story: The lab had been using both Ruffle and Conifer for preserving Flash works held at The NEXT. Our method was simple: We would test a work with Ruffle and compare it to the output on a legacy computer that still supported Flash or on a PC running Pale Moon. If the Ruffled version was not close enough to the original version, we would test the work with Conifer. Over time, we found that Conifer handled the more complex works better (or at all). We actually preferred it over Ruffle since it did not require us to intervene in the work’s code by adding the Ruffle code to it, which was not needed with Conifer. Our preference for Conifer led us to create our own instance of Conifer on a AWS server so that we could manage our own preservation activities with Conifer rather than lease space from Rhizome.org. At the same time, we bore a large cost in paying for the additional server space to host Conifer. We begrudgingly agreed that the plan one day would be to shift our process completely to Ruffle once Ruffle could grow to support all of our works.
The loss of Conifer has, indeed, pushed us to Ruffle entirely sooner than we expected.
Since Rhizome.org’s announcement, James Lesperance, our digital preservationist, has revisited the 282 Flash works that we preserved with Conifer to see if any of them can shift to Ruffle. As of today, 85 works can be. The rest can be partially preserved, need further testing, or not at all. So, less than a third.
As Ruffle continues to develop, we may be able to preserve other Flash works held in The NEXT that are not able to be saved at this juncture. In the meantime, we will add our scholarly note to each one no longer functioning. The truth is, the lab never imagined we were preserving works so that they would last “forever.” We have imagined, instead, that we were part of a relay race and that we are running with the baton for this leg of the event, long enough for the next runner can take the baton from us for another several laps or so.