When someone dies, their social media doesn't always disappear. It transforms — into a memorial, an archive, a place people return to for years. Quietly, privately, without language or permission.
This is ongoing research into what happens when those spaces are taken away. What is lost. How people carry grief when there is nowhere left to put it. And what it means to build systems that take digital memory seriously.
This is not finished scholarship. It's process, sense-making, and care-centered reflection in real time. You're welcome to read alongside, or simply witness the work as it takes shape.
Etherith wasn't built as a product. It was built as a response — to the experience of losing a friend, and then losing the place where grief for her lived when her page was taken down.
The research and the technology are the same project. One asks the question. The other tries to answer it. What would it look like to build systems that take digital memory seriously? That give people control over what persists, what is shared, and what is preserved?
Etherith stores memories permanently on IPFS — decentralized, outside the control of any single platform. It is a direct response to the disappearing spaces this research documents.
If you've lost a digital mourning space — if a social media page, a message thread, a profile was taken away and left you unmoored — this research wants to hear from you. Participation is a 45-minute Zoom conversation, audio or video, completely on your terms. Care, consent, and boundaries come first.