I will say on the topic of ppl being upset about the trend of companies deleting old/unused accounts/content/etc - there needs to be a better solution than just shutting shit down on a monthly basis but like. No matter how it seems, everything online IS physical - somewhere. The words I’m typing now are taking up infinitesimal space in the world as data stored on a physical thing which will be committed to Tumblr’s real, physical servers after I hit Post. That builds up fast & with increasing adoption of the internet such that people are living their whole lives on here, that has to like. Go somewhere. The internet archive is deeply important but it still requires loads of real life minerals, power, I’m sure water for cooling, etc & needs more and more with every additional hosted bit of something or other… Which is to say, if you find anything valuable enough that you don’t want it to be whisked away into the ether when a site shuts down or a server malfunctions or someone deems the information no longer in need of hosting or what have you, invest in a nice little external hard drive and start shoving what matters in there. For most people that’ll be plenty of room & cost effective (and better than paying Google Drive or something). If you’re really crazy & need to keep a lot of large files, and you want to know where they are in physical space and have control of them in physical space, having your own storage server isn’t much more complicated than setting up another PC with an emphasis on storage.
(via local-transan)