> If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: eve

> If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: every comment I write, every reply, every +1/-1. I've definitely lost access to sites unexpectedly a number of times, for things that did not seem like a big deal at the time. And poof, massive pieces of life & time are just gone. The particulars of this fight & this story (or my stupid stories) don't interest me, but that we write ourselves into the digital, and that it can all be closed & taken from us in an instant, far beyond our control is a sick power relation. I'd like to see a couple things- when sites close/ban accounts, they should provide some kind of download window. Here's your stuff: bye! As it is, it's usually too late. People's content goes up in smoke. "There should probably be a law": this feels like the most minimal basics. On the other side, when we do post content, I feel like sites should provide cryptographically signed signatures for our content. "Here's our http-signature for your post!" Yes we may delete your post in the future, unhost you, but here's some hard-to-deny math that says you posted it here. Rather than leaving users in eternal jeapordy, this would mean sites- at zero cost- at least have some stake in in the here & now, that a whole history can't just be unwound (just unhosted); ugly though it may be I see denying the past as too cruel to have as common practice. Damnatio Memoriae[1] is not an acceptable common punishment across the internet, for humanity, & for posterity; altering this devil's bargain requires only slightly tweaked technics. All in all, I'd rather we invert the system, build a better web fabric that starts with rights & gathering & attestation first (on our own properties), & interacts with sites second. The indieweb folk have been talking about POSSE[2] for a long time- Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere- but usually this is through the lens of posts & specific activity: perhaps all web activity just needs to be mediated first, through our own systems & networks, and then sent onward, forward to the targeted social-network second: posts, comments, upvotes, reactions, all of it. This feels like the real archiving fix: making ourselves & our own presences primary, leaving these networks as ancillary concerns, a shadow of what we really are. Intermediating with our own sovereign systems seems like a necessary step, feels like the only option given how powerless & out of control online systems are for their users. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae [2] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE