Websites don’t last forever, and neither do the stories we carefully (or carelessly) stack up upon their shelves. An unavoidable factor is that as netizens grow up, grow old, and die, fewer are around and eager to maintain old websites. However, the lion’s share of this effect comes from major social media aggregators working in interest of their capital (or dying from not doing this). Tossing our online relationships and memories into a hopper and pushing the paste around to fuel their DAU while minimizing cloud cost is something I’ve come to expect from consumer facing tech companies.
Ways to circumvent this:
- Smaller communities targeting a specific niche
- Archival projects & tools
- Decentralized social media
- Alternative funding models
- Local-first storage (like obsidian)