Nintendo's first attempt at creating a real online social network, Miiverse, became a surprisingly robust and meme-filled community of artists and fans in the years after it launched on the Wii U and 3DS. Then, last November, Nintendo unceremoniously shut it down and removed the archives from the Internet, noting, among other things, that "many users are shifting to social networking services."

This week, thanks to the efforts of Archive Team and the Internet Archive, you can search through a nearly 17 terabyte backup of hundreds of millions of posts, screenshots, and drawings from the over 8 million users that made Miiverse such a weird and special place.

Archiverse's sheer size makes it a bit hard to get a handle on, but there are still some gems to be found with some quick searching. The posts with the most approving "yeahs" in the Super Mario Maker community, for instance, serve as a quick-and-handy list of good levels to try out. The YouTube community is a great place to search for the kind of black-and-white dot art that helped drive the Miiverse community, including the work of the very popular MemeSenpai. Or, if you're in the mood for some quality "shitposting," the Funky Barn and New Super Luigi U community archives have you covered.

Archiverse comes online after a massive scraping effort that started in earnest once Nintendo announced Miiverse's imminent shutdown last August. "Any time a social network goes down, we lose a ton of data," Archive Team's Tim Miller told Ars when that work started. "Part of history, our culture, is lost. In Miiverse, especially in the art section, you can see people really investing a lot of their time and energy in it. And being able to save that for others to see and experience is extremely important."

The entire Archiverse archives are posted under an open source license, free for mirroring or even personal download if you want to perform a deep, offline analysis. I hope you've got a 17TB hard drive lying around...