I can't say I share your confidence.
Take Google Groups as an example.
Were it not for archival work being done by various volunteers, the content on Usenet was at real threat of vanishing from the internet.
This is hardly unique. We've seen the same thing happen with Geocities and Myspace, for example. Another poster also mentioned G+, which is an excellent recent case.
Is this a reason to not use these platforms at all? I don't think so.
But it is a reason to retain your own copies of the things you care about, hence why, for my own blog, I follow the POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) pattern:
Maybe it's impossible, but hopefully some day we can get to a point where social media silos are not necessary, with easy to set up and use personal sites/apps that use Indieweb principles. The Indieweb movement is excellent for this but needs a lot more developer contributions to make this dent a reality.
And speaking of that, because of purported spam problems a number of Usenet groups (and especially their archives) currently aren't available at all via Google Groups.
And yet years of fantastic RPG community contributions on g+ are absolutely fucking gone. At their best they got taken out into barely-accessible formats, so they technically "exist", even if you can't find any of their content anymore.
Ironically, I can’t actually read this blog post because it has become unavailable. I suspect that undermines his entire point.
I know people are really enjoying dunking on this guy for his web service outage, but I really don't think this is the right takeaway.
On this topic specifically he notes:
> All major commercial services such as reddit, Facebook and so forth keep everything a secret that is not ultimately necessary to use their services. Their software is a secret, they don't offer open APIs or only very crippled ones, you don't have the possibility to get to the raw data. So no luck there. You do have a lock-in situation.
This is an issue, not of availability, but of control.
Yeah, okay, his blog might be experiencing an outage right now. But he can move it. He can shift the content to another medium. He can back it up and retain ownership over it. As he very rightly points out:
> without very good support for data export, service duplication, open standards, any content you provide in closed web-based services will be lost just as MySpace already lost twelve years of content just so, just to mention one big example.
But, hey, let's ignore that and joke about his blog being down. After all, who doesn't enjoy a little schadenfreude from time to time, right?
I suspect that undermines your entire point.
Same goes for any product from Google, since they are notorious for service termination. In doing so, they abandoned their core promise of indexing the world's information. G+ is gone, and the Groups archive is ever-thinning: Usenet posts I made a couple of decades back were once accessible thus, since Google bought the Dejanews archives, but are no longer discoverable.
Fortunately all my most interesting snippets and contributions these days start life in my own private repositories, so I have my own record. Everyone should do the same.
As platforms mature, their APIs become more and more restrictive. E.g. Twitter's current API allows only a fraction of what it used to allow in its early days.
For me the point is that if you use an external platform then you no longer have control over your content; I think it still stands.
Stack Overflow is a nice counter example. Then again, all works fine as long as the goals of content authors and the platform are aligned.
the reason is that the longer I use them the more I pump data into it and the more I am getting suckered for when they shut them down. this is exactly the justification for why standards should be open.
Also, people may not realize this is a problem until it actually becomes a problem. In the mean time they will be happily rendering stuff on every page load, after fetching (static!) data from mysql on every single request.
None of this is true. All these services have pretty fully-featured APIs and several independent clients.
Even otherwise, the fact that some of them may not exist at some point in the future is a terrible reason to not use them at all. I still find tons of relevant content in hosted forums from the 90s and 00s, and more recent ones like Stack Overflow and Github.
I'm pretty confident that most of the services he is complaining about will last longer than his own blog post.