If there's a theme across geminispace, it's writing posts about how something on the web no longer works. Which is to say, it's only a matter of time before someone trips over a cord and wipes out everyone's wedding photos. Well, not literally that, but that ballpark: a tiny mistake at some company with disproportionately huge consequences for their users. It's dawning on everyone that we've entrusted all our precious memories and dark secrets to this thing that has a massive, embarrassing data breach a couple times a year. You're afraid to confirm it, but you just know your old Yahoo burner accounts were scooped up in one of those.
The longer we live with the web, the more it seems flimsy and ephemeral. By turning it into a universal entertainment platform, we've made it so that an internet outage cuts you off from most media and communication, as well as a bunch of your own stuff. Every time something like that happens on a large scale - an outage of a major site or service - we get a day or two of op-eds about how we've entrusted too much of our lives to the cloud, followed by no change whatsoever.
All terribly annoying in the short term, but does anyone have a plan for the long term? What happens to all the shit we're uploading when we're all dead and it's our great-grandkids' problem to sort out? Will the historians of the 23rd century see any value in the billions of photos we're currently posting to Instagram? Or, if two more centuries worth of online bullshit has built up by then, will they know better than to bother?
This has all been a very longwinded way of saying I cannot for the life of me figure out the digital equivalent of discovering a shoebox of old photos. Living a life just creates fewer physical artifacts than it used to. The digital replacements for those artifacts are largely ephemeral, existing only as long as the underlying technology works, and dependent on factors entirely outside of the users' control. It's difficult to imagine the whole family gathering 'round to look at Grannddad's old Instagram profile - not because that's a hack joke, but because there's no way a profile that old would still display correctly on whatever future version of the app your grandkids are using by then.
Again, no solutions here, just an ongoing grudge against companies that want me to store my stuff on their computers instead of on my own.