> You’ll own everything, and it’ll be yours forever. No investors, no market changes, and not a single external factor will sweep away all your work there.
The internet is ephemeral. Blogging platform user accounts, domain names, VPSes, IP addresses, home servers, and software like Wordpress, Apache/Nginx, or Linux distributions don't last forever and require frequent maintenance and updates. If you passed away tomorrow, it's unlikely your content would be accessible online for more than a few years from now.
If you want your work to survive as long as possible, print your texts on acid-free materials and store them in a plastic bag within a Thermos-like container to protect against temperature, humidity, and light changes, as well as water and chemicals. Distribute copies globally for redundancy against disasters and fires, and there's a reasonable chance your work will be around for at least a thousand years.
However, we blog and put our work online not for ownership or preservation, but to get it out there. The internet is a communication tool, and it has short-attention-span readers anyways. The goal is to disseminate your work rather than own or preserve it. So does it matter if it's on a platform that will die in a decade?
If you want your work to be preserved for many hundreds of years and in a way that's accessible to everyone, you need to build a monument. Otherwise, you can pick one of the two: dissemination or preservation. Though of course, improving the longevity of your content on the internet can be done and it's not entirely black and white. But if we are looking at the big picture and using words like "forever", I don't think internet is a medium for preserving anything on that scale, nor will it exist in the form it does today a hundred years from now.
The internet is ephemeral. Blogging platform user accounts, domain names, VPSes, IP addresses, home servers, and software like Wordpress, Apache/Nginx, or Linux distributions don't last forever and require frequent maintenance and updates. If you passed away tomorrow, it's unlikely your content would be accessible online for more than a few years from now.
If you want your work to survive as long as possible, print your texts on acid-free materials and store them in a plastic bag within a Thermos-like container to protect against temperature, humidity, and light changes, as well as water and chemicals. Distribute copies globally for redundancy against disasters and fires, and there's a reasonable chance your work will be around for at least a thousand years.
However, we blog and put our work online not for ownership or preservation, but to get it out there. The internet is a communication tool, and it has short-attention-span readers anyways. The goal is to disseminate your work rather than own or preserve it. So does it matter if it's on a platform that will die in a decade?
If you want your work to be preserved for many hundreds of years and in a way that's accessible to everyone, you need to build a monument. Otherwise, you can pick one of the two: dissemination or preservation. Though of course, improving the longevity of your content on the internet can be done and it's not entirely black and white. But if we are looking at the big picture and using words like "forever", I don't think internet is a medium for preserving anything on that scale, nor will it exist in the form it does today a hundred years from now.