It is not the web's fault, and let's not throw out the baby out with the bathwater. There are Web forums out there which are archivable, backupable, and distrib

It is not the web's fault, and let's not throw out the baby out with the bathwater. There are Web forums out there which are archivable, backupable, and distributable. And many pages can be saved locally. There is also Internet Archive, archive.today, and much other infrastructure to address distribution, backup, and all-around resilience. All the big platforms suffer from not giving you much choice to export your own writing once you've sent it. I think it is as much for reasons of attempted lock-in as it is due to incompetence and scaling pains. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms will all present a challenge when you try to "find that thing I wrote two weeks ago". The only solution I can see is to build services which allow content export in usable format and to continuously audit these backups yourself. I think it is a solution which only seems difficult at first, but is possible already with tooling available today, and can be made accessible to a non-programmer with some effort. For my own project, I consciously chose .txt as the base format for both text and metadata, and have tried to make even the metadata as readable as possible. I regularly do a clone test of my blog and message board, meaning I download the data export, unpack it on another (disconnected) instance, and ensure all content has made it across. (Thanks to using PKI for accounts, full continuity and sync can be achieved across multiple instances.) I think the key to maintaining a trustworthy community is keeping the size small, to where all the activity can be monitored and reviewed by a human. Once you're facing a firehose, you're at the mercy of all the forces out there.