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Looking at my feed in the fediverse and it seems like almost every day there is some new drama relating to a server announcing it is shutting down or development stopping on some piece of open source software. Similarly there are efforts by many groups to store as much as possible for posterity as library like archives or via piracy sites. It just set me thinking about our expectations of permanence in a frequently impermanent world.
As a kid music was available on the radio, on vinyl, cassette, and eventually on CD. Once I had a copy I could play it wherever I had a playback device, and given appropriate equipment make copies of it. I recorded songs off the radio and ripped my favourite records from vinyl to cassette to make mixtapes that I could play in my car. Then a few years later I took those records, and my favourite mixtapes, and ripped them onto my computer to burn them onto CDs as CD audio I could play in my car. Then as MP3s onto more CDs and MP3 players as the devices developed. I accepted that the tools and the formats would change more or less every time, and that even now decades later than some of the first recordings were made I am still updating metadata or reripping originals to improve the quality and playback experience.
It's the same with technology. I've lost count of the social networks I've tried that died. Operating systems have faired a bit better, but only because I started in Unix like environments and am back in Linux most of the time after annoying years of Windows updates and Mac incompatibilities. So why are we surprised when people get tired and decide to take a break? Why do we expect services to last forever when fifteen or twenty years ago they didn't even exist?
Is it just differing expectations? I don't expect my social media posts to last forever, and even this blog was created as an experiment to see if I'd write again after deleting countless earlier services. I don't know, but it is interesting to see how our relationship with what was niche technology only a couple of decades ago.