Yes, too many digital eggs in one digital basket.

A few years ago, my Microsoft account got suspended for a month without any reason given in the end. Probably tripped some kind of param with some kind of algorithm.

Anyway, in that month, I couldn't use Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Microsoft Store purchases, my Xbox (all my games are digital), Microsoft Store developer portal, Outlook email address and calendar. There was probably other stuff too.

It pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks on both a personal and professional level.

Whilst a single corp providing so many services can be very compelling, it's a disaster if for any reason you can't access your account.

A little after Microsoft had bought hotmail and was revamping and syncing the UI with outlook, I was travelling and hadn't logged into my account for a few months. The account, my oldest email account, had become my secondary account ever since the launch of gmail.

I logged in to discover that they had wiped all my emails due to those months of inactivity. All my correspondences through high school and college. Hilarious and thoughtful messages from some who had died randomly way too early.

I was so enraged I was rendered speechless. I couldn't even bring myself to try to complain helplessly. It was as if someone just walked into my house while I was on vacation and burned the whole place down with all my life's letters stored in my desk.

As far as I'm aware, it was the first time a large email provider pulled some shit like this.

A few years later--before all those cops playing Taylor Swift songs--when I uploaded a video I made from a wedding to FB to my small network, it was insta-removed due to the music playing in the background.

These motherfuckers will keep stealing yours memories. Because in this era once you record your memory, it is no longer yours -- it's theirs. It's said that Native Americans believed that taking photographs of them would steal their soul.

They were right.

Now, I use a Docker container to backup and version my Gmail. My assumption these days is that at some point, it'll either go bust, be deprecated (ala Reader et al), get hacked, they'll have irrecoverable data loss, or my email client will get a bad update.

I'd host my own mail server, but the deliverability is generally a nightmare, and completely sporadic. Feel like a lot of our digital life is hostage to major corps.

Open standards, interoperability et al should be mandatory for major public services.

There are various options between big-corp-controlled-emails and self-hosting-your-own-server. An example is Migadu.

Migadu certainly sounds good, but even their biggest plan seems a little on the smaller side. We are big fans of actionable email notifications that can be responded to, e.g., GitHub, Gitea, Active Collab. A response via email gets put into the respective platform/server, so we would very quickly chew through the in/out, and we get a huge amount of spam, and customer support emails.

The same thing happened to me, but with my Yahoo account. It was my first email ID, something that I made when I was 11 years old. The memories of my first emails, when my friends and I were discovering the internet in the mid 2000s, were completely wiped out.

I was affected by the same hotmail wipe. My hotmail account was from 1998, and Microsoft decided to wipe it.. All my memories gone. Fuck them I've never used MS crap for anything of value since then.