Linked: The Old Internet Died And We Watched And Did Nothing

This is a really good reminder to not rely on a third-party to be the home of all of your stuff. You may end up losing it forever.

Despite the constant flurries of social startups (Vine! Snapchat! TikTok! Ello! Meerkat! Peach! Path! Yo!), when the dust was blown off the chisel, the 2010s revealed that the content you made — your photos, your writing, your texts, emails, and DMs — is almost exclusively in the hands of the biggest tech companies: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple.

The rest? Who knows? I hate to tell you, but there’s a good chance it’s gone forever.

This is why I still run my own website. Yes I pay a company to host it for me, but all of the content is mine. I can move it all anytime I want, and I make sure to keep it backed up on a regular basis.

Even when I use a third-party site, like I do with Flickr for my photos, I also keep them backed up elsewhere. I don’t want to lose them should Flickr continue to lose money and go away.

Don’t just assume that your photos, videos, writings, and everything else you’ve created will always be there. Make sure you maintain some control over the stuff that you want to have 10 years from now. As big as Facebook and Google might be now, there’s no guarantee they won’t shut down things over the next ten years.

Just ask anyone who created a lot of stuff for Google Plus how that worked out.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/how-we-killed-the-old-internet

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