Broadsheet

If you followed along with the recent joyful celebrations of the Artemis cruise around the moon, and took a moment to dive into the photographic archives of the mission, you might have noticed that all of the original images were shared by NASA on the venerable photo sharing service Flickr. What you might not know is… why?

Here’s the TL;DR:

Flickr comes from (and helped start!) the Web 2.0 era, which was based on users having control over their data
Tools at that time began giving creators the power to decide what license they wanted to release their content under, including permissions about how it could be shared, used, or remixed
Because the people who made platforms back then were users and creators themselves, they thought about the long term and wanted to be able to preserve people’s work
After lots of corporate shuffling, Flickr ended up in the hands of a family-owned company, SmugMug, and they made the Flickr Foundation to preserve public photos for the next 100 years
NASA’s images should only be on a service where they can be stored in full resolution, for the long term, dedicated to the public domain — which the other social media apps of today can’t do

The Photographic Record

First, some background for folks who might not know what Flickr is, or who may have forgotten. Flickr is a social sharing site for photography which was founded in 2004, and these days people might say that it shares some of its cofounders with Slack, though back when Slack started, everybody said that the company was started by some of the founders of Flickr. That’s because Flickr was arguably the most influential site of the Web 2.0 era, helping define everything from the user interface design to the bright colors to the easy way that developers could access data from the platform. A lot of the things that we take for granted on the modern social internet, like a friendly “voice” used to communicate to users, were pioneered by Flickr, and then quickly came to be considered standard expectations for the apps and sites that followed. It’s hard to imagine that sites from Tumblr to Grindr would have omitted their final “e”s without Flickr’s precedent.

Flickr spun out of a Canadian gaming company called Ludicorp, founded by Stewart Butterfield (later CEO/co-founder of Slack) and Caterina Fake (later an investor and chair of Etsy). The photo-sharing service was extracted from the pieces of a somewhat unsuccessful attempt at multiplayer gaming called “Game Neverending”, but it retained the playfulness of that game even as it became a social app. Flickr also inherited the fine-grained privacy controls and thoughtful community features of earlier social platforms like LiveJournal — along with being actively, intentionally moderated by actual humans who worked diligently to prevent destructive behaviors on the platform. This meant that, more than 20 years ago, this early photo sharing community typically had better social norms than people see on today’s social media apps. (A little side note: Part of Flickr/Ludicorp’s initial funding was with public money. What a remarkable way to fund lasting innovation!)

With all of these groundbreaking features, Flickr didn’t just inspire lots of other entrepreneurs to create a new wave of Web 2.0 startups, it also attracted millions of users who, for the first time, began taking photos with the primary goal of sharing them online. Prior to this moment, the earliest phones with decent cameras were coming to market (it would be years until the iPhone came out), and other photo services of the time were still often oriented towards taking film to processing facilities, and then having the professionals at those facilities scan the resulting images and post them to a clunky online service where you could tediously click through them in a virtual album. Until Flickr, photo sharing online was essentially still analog, even if the experience was technically happening online.

In Focus

Flickr wasn't a social platform first — it was a photography platform first. That means it was designed to store high-resolution versions of every image, and didn't distort pictures with things like filters. Every image showed details like what kind of camera had taken the photo, and even what specific settings were used to take the shot. People started building communities around the then-new idea of using tags to help them find content by topics online — an idea that would directly influence the creation of hashtags on Twitter a few years later.

Another core idea of the time was a firm belief in open data: people should own and control their own work. Eventually, some experts (including a then-teenage Aaron Swartz, who we'd later talk about in the early days of Markdown) created a set of standards called Creative Commons licenses, now maintained by an organization of the same name. Flickr made it easy for users to describe what permissions people had for reusing or remixing any photos they posted. (I was helping out with a blogging platform back then, and I think we were the first tool to support this stuff. It felt like a big deal at the time!)

People's Flickr images started popping up in corporate PowerPoint presentations or commercial advertising almost immediately. A little sidebar: the incredibly positive and generous intent of these open licenses has since been exploited by extractive Big AI companies, who ransacked all of the images on Flickr that had permissive licenses without any consent from, or compensation to, the creators. That might be legal by most readings of the licenses, but if you have hundreds of billions of dollars and don't think you should at least have a conversation with the photographers whose work you're using, you're probably an asshole.

Archival Prints

Our close-knit community of people building the new era of web apps was keenly aware that our users were creating culture. This realization brought a huge amount of responsibility — not just in enabling users to express themselves, but in thinking about the long term for people's ownership of their works. Public institutions had just begun to use these platforms, which meant that the content being shared wasn't just a nice picture to look at: it might be socially or even historically significant.

What happened in the years that followed was… a lot of corporate machinations. Flickr got bought by Yahoo. Flickr's founders left Yahoo. Yahoo got bought by Verizon. You can imagine how all of that went; the details aren't all that important, except to say that by the time Instagram launched, Flickr had begun to fade into obscurity. People were focused on mobile phones instead of the desktop, on sharing square images with filters instead of full-resolution photography, and on connecting socially instead of caring about photos as art or a cultural record. Nobody would post the canonical historical photo of an event with a Valencia filter on it. Most of Flickr's users moved on, rarely checking their old accounts — until a family-owned photo service named SmugMug bought the service from Yahoo. A human-scale operation with some actual heart and a love of photography was a much better home for the platform than some random division of Verizon.

Commons Sense

In 2022, the new team at SmugMug that owned Flickr decided to focus on Flickr’s larger place in culture. Many major institutions around the world had chosen to archive their public photos on Flickr because of its superior support for high-resolution imagery, its unique ability to declare explicit legal licenses (including public domain licenses), and its long-term reputation for reliably hosting content without any of the harms or abuses that typical social networks had inflicted on users. Museums around the world had entire catalogs on the platform, and governments routinely used it to document their public events. When I had a photo taken at an official White House event with President Obama, his team sent me the final image afterward by sending me a Flickr link; when Zohran Mamdani met King Charles, the NYC Mayor’s Office shared those pictures on Flickr, too.

The Flickr team at SmugMug did something special with their responsibility about these public works, due to their cultural significance to the world. They made the Flickr Commons, and brought in a team with expertise in digital archiving and community. This is a project of The Flickr Foundation, designed to preserve digital legacies, and begun in collaboration with no less than the U.S. Library of Congress (back before that was an institution under siege.) They are developing a hundred year plan for how to care for these works, which is virtually unheard-of in the digital world. (You should absolutely donate to support the Flickr Foundation in their mission to preserve these vital public resources for many years in the future.)

It’s in this context that NASA has long been sharing its imagery on Flickr, for all of its missions — not just Artemis II. There’s even a special section for NASA on The Commons. And since everything is provided in incredibly high-resolution and has every single detail about the photo and how it was taken, it’s possible to combine the information about the photo with other data and create amazing resources like this beautiful timeline of the entire mission. You can see Hank Green’s wonderful narration of his inspiration and creative journey behind the timeline right here:

Why Not With Us?

Anybody who’s read my site for a while knows that I’m a huge proponent of owning your own website, and having your own content live there. Shouldn’t NASA, of all institutions, have their photos live on their own nasa.gov website? Well, yes! But.

One complication is that many large institutions, especially ones that have developed complex processes for good reasons, like government agencies and big businesses, often have trouble maintaining public-facing web infrastructure over long timeframes. Running a website that millions of people can access requires constant updates and maintenance, guarding against a never-ending onslaught of security challenges (a task that’s rapidly getting more difficult!), and the internal knowledge on how a site was created in the first place often leaves when employees do.

In contrast, platforms that are run by technically fluent, well-intentioned and thoughtful technologists can be very effective in maintaining content over a timescale of decades. The SmugMug team has been very thoughtful in managing both their business and their technical infrastructure in order to sustain Flickr’s public archives for years to come. (Though, as mentioned, you should still donate to ensure they can keep doing so!)

What’s more painful is the more recent threats to public stewardship of this kind of content. The traditional authoritarian impulse to destroy or falsify the public record has not spared the digital realm under the current administration. Wide swaths of the government’s websites have been erased, taken offline, or had their content modified to either delete or adulterate the content. Leaders who regularly post AI slop on their social media accounts, and who have begun posting lies and distortions on major websites like the White House’s, will of course not hesitate to modify or remove photos from public archives as well. By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.

We’ll be glad to have archives like Flickr’s in the future, and people around the world will be glad for its place in archiving even much more mundane aspects of culture.

Taking off

I was honored to get to reflect on my long history with Flickr, and with online community, in an interview with my old friend Jessamyn West, for the Flickr Foundation’s blog. In a conversation that unspooled over a few months, I think we covered so many of the themes that resonated in what I’ve mentioned here, and what struck me most was how much I wanted a new generation of people on the internet to have their own version of the communities and experiences that we got to have when sites like Flickr were first being made. People still cherish those values!

The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial. Sometimes a bunch of decent people can do a good thing for the right reasons, and the result of that work can persevere for decades. Then, others who do some of the most ambitious and astounding things imaginable can build on that work to inspire us. And then, some more regular folks can build on top of that and help us waste a little bit of time just clicking around on something fun. That’s what the internet is supposed to be about!

This isn’t just about recounting old web lore — this is about explaining the internet we have right now. Hank’s timeline site is brand new, entertaining a whole new generation, and probably the majority of the audience who are looking at it weren’t even born when Flickr was first conceived. But the reason he can build that site is because of the values and the inventiveness of the team and community who created a platform like Flickr — and because those kinds of values are durable. They might not be as loud or flashy, but they are still everywhere, quietly enabling a lot of the things we enjoy most every day.

Public dollars helped make a fascinating community, then public dollars enabled a breathtaking journey into space, and then a public commons helped a creator make a novel way to explore that journey. Lots of people chose, over and over, to be generous with their genius. These are all gifts that a bunch of strangers gave each other, over hundreds of thousands of miles, and many years. Inspiration is all around us!

There is a frenzied feeling to the news coming from the White House these days.

Yesterday, the administration tried to blame Democrats and the media for the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, when Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives on the floor above the room where the dinner was taking place. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called opponents of Trump a “left-wing cult of hatred against POTUS and all of those who support him” and blamed the “entire Democrat party” for the event.

Shots were fired during that incident, although not in the room where Trump, cabinet members, or the press were seated, but there is a good chance it was actually not Cole Tomas Allen, the intruder, who fired them. Yesterday the Department of Justice charged Allen with attempting to assassinate the president.

At his press conference hours after the event, Trump insisted the trouble proved the need for his proposed ballroom. On Sunday morning, the Department of Justice (DOJ) demanded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation drop its lawsuit against Trump’s plans, saying the “lawsuit puts the lives of the President, his family, and his staff at grave risk.” The National Trust for Historic Preservation rejected the demand yesterday, saying that while the event was “awful,” it did not change the fact that Trump must follow the law and get congressional approval for the ballroom.

Yesterday Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and others jumped in front of the cameras to present a bill to appropriate $400 million of taxpayer money to build the ballroom. Republican loyalists in the House have also called for public funding of a ballroom.

Late last night, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche filed a motion to dissolve the court’s preliminary injunction stopping the construction of the ballroom (although the court did not stop the construction of the bunker underneath the proposed addition). The motion begins: “‘The National Trust for Historic Preservation’ is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE because when they add the words ‘in the United States’ to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes it sound like a Governmental Agency, which it is not.” It goes on from there, insisting for seven pages that the lack of a ballroom endangers Trump. Chris Geidner of LawDork called the motion “deranged.”

The administration’s focus on the ballroom seems to echo Trump’s insistence after his first inauguration that the crowd at that inauguration was bigger than that at President Barack Obama’s. Anyone could see that was a lie, but Trump and his administration officials clung to it. Forcing supporters to accept a lie as reality is a key tool of authoritarians, making it harder for them to reject the next lie, and so on. The claim that Democrats are calling for violence, when in fact it has been Trump calling for executing those he believes are his enemies, follows that pattern exactly.

But there is at least one other story behind the administration’s insistence on building Trump’s ballroom: the man desperately needs a win.

His war in Iran has settled into a humiliating stalemate in which Iranian leaders appear to be calling the shots. Speaking to German students on Monday, German chancellor Frederich Merz said that the U.S. clearly has no strategic plan and that the “entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”

Gas prices are at their highest level in four years, with the average U.S. price for a gallon of regular at $4.18. Economist Paul Krugman noted in his Substack today that the world is currently using oil that it had in storage, but when that runs out, prices will rise enough to get rid of the demand for about 11 or more million barrels of oil a day. Krugman illustrated his article with a picture of an egg in a vise.

On Saturday, April 25, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Mosheh Gains, and Natasha Lebedeva of NBC News reported that the damage Iran inflicted on American military bases, radar systems, aircraft, warehouses, and infrastructure in the Gulf region was far worse than the administration has told the public and will cost up to $5 billion to repair.

On Sunday, Democratic senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts responded to reports from survivors that the U.S. military post in Kuwait where six service members died and at least 20 more were injured was unprotected.

One of the injured soldiers told CBS News that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s statement that a drone “squeaked through” was false. “I want people to know the unit…was unprepared to provide any defense for itself,” the service member said. “It was not a fortified position.” The senators asked Hegseth to explain by May 11 why the post did not have protection against drones and who was responsible for that lack.

Yesterday Missy Ryan, Vivian Salama, Michael Scherer, and Nancy A. Youssef of The Atlantic published a piece that echoed others by indicating that Vice President J.D. Vance is distancing himself from the Iran debacle, in this case by questioning whether Hegseth is providing Trump accurate information about the war. An article in The Hill by Alexander Bolton said Republican senators are losing confidence in Hegseth as he hollows out the ranks of senior military officers.

The Republican-dominated Congress is not helping Trump look competent. The short-term extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expires on April 30. The House of Representatives was also scheduled to address the farm bill, a multiyear bill addressing farm and nutrition policies. Finally, the House is long overdue in funding the Department of Homeland Security, which has now been operating without appropriations for more than 70 days. The Senate unanimously passed a measure to fund most of DHS on March 27, but Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has yet to take it up.

Republican infighting kept a rules package that would advance the measures bottled up in committee yesterday, but this evening the Rules Committee advanced the three measures out of committee. As Emily Brooks of The Hill noted, it’s not clear the necessary rule will pass the House, which has to happen before the measures themselves can come to a vote. Johnson can afford to lose only two Republican votes on the rule, and already members are expressing reservations about voting yes.

And so, Trump and his loyalists are trying desperately to demonstrate their dominance. Just today, Benjamin Parker of The Bulwark reported that the State Department is finalizing plans to put an image of Trump’s face in U.S. passports that are issued from the Washington, D.C., Passport Agency. They are already minting a $1 coin with his face on it, issuing a gold commemorative coin with his face on it, and putting Trump’s face on national park passes.

Also today, the Pentagon asked Congress to change the name of the Defense Department to the “Department of War,” making formal the change administration officials informally made last year. This change, accentuating Trump and Hegseth’s focus on a “warrior ethos” instead of the defensive alliances the U.S. has enjoyed since World War II, will cost taxpayers $52 million.

Trump has also ramped up his attacks on those he perceives to be enemies. Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it is reviewing ABC’s licenses after late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about First Lady Melania Trump last Thursday. Trump loyalist Brendan Carr, who, as Daniel Arkin of NBC News notes, frequently attacks media organizations, chairs the FCC.

The administration has also gone after former FBI director James Comey again. A federal grand jury in North Carolina has indicted him for making a threat “to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States, in that he publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ‘86 47’, which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.” That is, Comey’s posting a picture of seashells on a beach arranged in the pattern of 86 47—in slang, 86 means to get rid of something, and Trump is the 47th president—was a threat against Trump’s life.

The grand jury also issued a warrant for Comey’s arrest.

Comey has been a thorn in Trump’s side since the beginning of his first term, when Comey refused to drop the FBI investigation into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives. Trump fired him. Then, in September 2025 under then–attorney general Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice charged Comey with lying to Congress, but a judge dismissed the case, saying that Lindsey Halligan, the prosecutor who brought it, had been appointed illegally. Now, Acting Attorney General Blanche appears to be currying favor with Trump by going after Comey again.

In July 2025, Trump also fired Comey’s daughter, Maurene Comey, from her job as assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Maurene Comey specializes in prosecuting white-collar crime and corruption. She led cases against sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

Comey moved to private practice but sued over her firing. The Department of Justice tried to get the case moved from court to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which has come under the sway of the Department of Justice itself, but today a judge kept the case in court, saying it was not a routine firing. “Maurene Comey was, by all accounts, an exemplary Assistant United States Attorney. In her nearly ten years working at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, she was assigned some of the country’s highest profile cases, and she consistently received the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike,” the judge said.

Flailing on multiple fronts, Trump is so desperate to demonstrate dominance that this afternoon, at about 3:30, the official social media account of the White House posted a picture of Trump and King Charles, who is in the U.S. on a state visit, with the caption “TWO KINGS.”

James Comey had his own answer to Trump’s aspirations to authoritarianism: “Well, they’re back,” he said in a video today. “This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won’t be the end of it. But nothing has changed with me. I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid. And I still believe in the independent federal judiciary, so let’s go.

“But,” he added, “it’s really important that all of us remember this is not who we are as a country. This is not how the Department of Justice is supposed to be. And the good news is we get closer every day to restoring those values. Keep the faith.”

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Notes:

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/after-assassination-attempt-white-house-blames-democrats-media-for-political-violence/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/04/27/trump-ballroom-national-trust-lawsuit/

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.287645/gov.uscourts.dcd.287645.79.0.pdf

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5852036-gop-senators-white-house-ballroom-bill/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-congress-republicans-push-legislation-build-fund-trumps-400-million-ballroom-2026-04-27/