Kaitlyn Tiffany on the disappearing internet

At the same time, the internet is constantly disappearing. It’s a world of broken links and missing files—often because the people in charge cast things off on a whim. In 2019, MySpace lost 50 million music files and apologized for “the inconvenience.” Around the same time, Flickr started deleting photos at random. Even though many of Vine’s most unnerving or charming or “iconic” six-second videos have been preserved, its community was shattered when the platform was shut down.

This is one of my big worries about where to publish to. I am always reluctant to get invested in somewhere that my content is because I just don’t want to loose it.

Tweets and random chat is nothing to be concerned about, but I have lost too much of my writing over the years to fools and their websites to loose more to services shutting down or just misplacing it.

You can preserve site through the internet archive as much as you like, but it doesn’t get back the links and feelings that go with it. So making sure to preserve as many details about my digital life as possible is important to me, and one things I needed to make sure my writing app does. I have toyed with the idea of also backing this up in text documents with dates etc in them, but that just another long term project that I never get around too.