A huge aspect of me enjoying publishing online these days, is witnessing every single silo out there censor, ban, abuse their customers. The latest case is the insane takedown of a YouTube stream with half a billion views by a Malaysian company. Yes, the stream is back but until when?
52% of YouTube videos live in 2010 have been deleted, by the way.
Twitter is probably the craziest case. People who use this app daily, don’t own anything they’ve spent hundreds of hours on. Some folks have literally tweeted a million times. It’s wild.
Reddit is known for being controlled by a .01% of mods doing whatever they want.
There are countless stories of Google, Apple and Microsoft fumbling people’s cloud drives, making them lose their accounts or getting banned, for x or y reasons. It’s always vague and support is always missing.
Being very dependent on private, huge companies online is not what you want. Convenience is the Bait, do not fall for it or if you do, know what’s going on: you don’t own your stuff anymore. Believe that.
When I post a gif and that I know it’s not going to go anywhere, that all my pictures are mine and not Meta’s, that all my music is mine and not YouTube’s, etc. And that I can backup and export and start over my digital life if I need to.
Well, it feels fucking nice.