Permanence and the Internet
Following up on my last post, it's worth noting that the people who have content on 10C (including me) were and are all people who have a certain level of belief and confidence in the person who created the platform, and yet are attempting to ensure their content survives a possible end to it.
That being the case, there's an interesting dichotomy between using a small independent platform such as 10C or Write.as, and the desire to make sure your content is preserved and survives. A one-man shop will never be able to guarantee the same level of permanence as the Bloggers or Wordpresses of the world.
Or can they?
Ultimately, nothing on the Internet is permanent. Websites and social media platforms are inherently evanescent. There's an argument to be made that no matter how large the company or how popular the platform, it can all disappear in the blink of an eye.
MySpace. Google+. Jaiku. Posterous. The history of the Web is replete with examples of large and seemingly successful platforms that all disappeared, taking many people's content with them. Size alone is no guarantee of continuance.
And even if you download your stuff, it can still disappear. Hard drives can crash. Cloud providers can have an outage or go out of business. Thumb drives and CDs can become corrupted. And of course, file formats can become obsolete and unreadable.
You can try to print it all out, but then there's fire, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes...you really can't win.
In the meantime, small creators can often provide a level of service a cut above what the big boys give you, but you do have to be comfortable with a certain level of Buddhist acceptance of the impermanence of all things.
And in the end, you can't take any of it with you anyway.
Om.
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