Today is the North American launch anniversary of a now mostly defunct animation website. Flipnote Hatena was a one of a kind social media service released in 2009 to pair with the Flipnote Studio application on the Nintendo DSi. The studio was a simple yet effective animation program that was available for free, and Flipnote Hatena allowed users to share their animations. The service was successful and thousands of hours of animation was produced by amateur animators teaching themselves how to animate with a DS stylus if not just their fingers.
Then the unthinkable happened and the servers were shut down. There are a few archive services such as Sudomemo, but even these don't have a lot of old Flipnotes and for the most part it's still an example of the internet being a Library of Alexandria that's constantly burning and being filled at the same time. That being said, I'm just glad someone on YouTube saved my favorite Flipnote series, J inc.'s Juggernaut.
I've heard about this site but not all the details, how much indie animation was lost when this thing went down?