On December 15th, Rhizome announced the sunset, or “twilight” of the Conifer service. The service will be taken down some time around June 2026. As some of you know, the Conifer service was a previous-generation archiving service which was developed during my collaboration with Rhizome between 2016 and 2020.

Having led the development of Conifer for many years, I am a bit bittersweet about this announcement, but I understand this is the right move as technology evolves and Conifer’s approach to archiving is no longer sustainable. Dragan Espenschied, the Preservation Director at Rhizome, has coordinated closely with us around this process and I believe the result is a carefully planned platform wind-down.

As explained in the post, Rhizome is offering many options for Conifer users, including self-hosting using ReplayWeb.page, and continued hosting through by Rhizome (also via ReplayWeb.page). As part of this process, Rhizome will migrate all Conifer collections to WACZ files in the future, and we at Webrecorder will provide guidance throughout the process as needed.

I’m especially excited to partner with Rhizome in inviting Conifer users to sign up for Browsertrix. Once the migration to WACZ files is complete, Conifer users will be able to upload their collections into Browsertrix. Conifer users will also receive a discount code for Browsertrix for one year. Of course, this is only one of the options available to Conifer users, and no data will be transferred between Conifer and Browsertrix without users’ consent and opt-in.

For Conifer users who’d like to continue to manually web archive in their own browsers, similar to how Conifer operated, we recommend the ArchiveWeb.page extension or desktop app. The extension can also be integrated with Browsertrix for hosting locally created WACZ files as uploads in Browsertrix.

I believe Rhizome is offering a model example of how to wind down a long-running service with flexible options and plenty of advance notice to meet the varied needs of Conifer users. I want to especially thank Dragan Espenschied as well as Mark Beasley, Rhizome’s former Senior Developer, who has kept Conifer running for the past 5 years, in preparing a careful transition process.

As the final sunset/twilight date gets closer, we will continue to coordinate with Rhizome and hope to welcome interested Conifer users to Browsertrix in the future!

---