Thinking abt the Tumblr purge, the new discord policy, & recent AO3 discourse... I wish more ppl realised that there& #39;s no such thing as stability on the internet. If a website hosting provider decides to delete data, they would axe billions of files with the press of a button. +

The ffnet & wattpad situations,,, even internet archive has been saying they& #39;re at risk. AO3 is a great service, & it& #39;s an important model on how to archive data. It might collapse eventually, as history repeats itself, but the ideology remains. A new service will come after it.

Thinking abt what happened to megaupl*ad. It can happen to any website, anytime. There is no "cloud", ur data is on someone else& #39;s computer. Servers in a basement somewhere. The safest & way to store data is in offline external hard drives, & even those are fragile & can break.

Ppl ask, why does A03 asks for donations, "it& #39;s just a website" - all the data u post & consume on it has to be stored SOMEWHERE. They need physical servers, these aren& #39;t for free & they cost a lot, & they talk about it on their blogs so it& #39;s no secret.

I& #39;m rambling abt this topic cz it interests me, u can ignore me. This extends past A03 - there r academic online libraries at risk of getting axed cz of copyr!ght. It& #39;s sad. I& #39;m of the belief that knowledge should be accessed by the masses. But hosting servers don& #39;t really care.

Point is; save everything u care about. I have a 4TB external hard drive I use to store what I want to keep forever, with dates & names, for archiving purposes. My irls say it& #39;s useless & I can just use g**gle drive - sure, but there is no "forever" on a cloud, or online.