This case study presents the fall of Orkut, a pioneering social network that once dominated the cyberspace of Brazil. The study emphasizes the role of Orkut’s forum-like communities as platforms for collective interactions and experiments with new social protocols that shaped the Brazilian digital landscape of the 2000s. Contrasting the careful protocols for handling the platform’s deactivation with its associated Community Archive’s abrupt ending, the study highlights the challenges of preserving digital history. Despite its disappearance, Orkut’s influence persists through fragmented online traces and vivid personal recollections, offering some insight into the intricate relationship between digital spaces, protocol death, and collective memory.