On one hand, prices change. Services change. When a sandwich shop stops carrying your favourite pickles... such is life. OTOH... I do feel this is problematic.

On one hand, prices change. Services change. When a sandwich shop stops carrying your favourite pickles... such is life. OTOH... I do feel this is problematic. Wordpress.com isn't FB/Twitter, but it is a meaningfully big part of social media... and therefore all media. A lot gets lost when the inevitable content loss happens. There are moral responsibilities and societal needs here that companies aren't going to assume. We should be accumulating an accessible and useful content commons. That's not compatible with commercial content hosting individual bloggers/users. I now think that the rights and wrongs of free speech in our era is much more complicated than I had previously thought. But whatever free speech ought to be, it cannot be both free and under the control of a few companies... even those at wordpress.com's scale. Can we really not just have a freedom (as in both freedom & $0) in the blogging space? Can't hosting be solved with an open protocol, or something like a wikipedia fondation? What we have now for social media really sucks. It sucks in terms of freedom. It sucks in terms of moderation. It sucks in terms of fake news, propaganda & such. It sucks in terms of power dynamics. The software/UI itself often sucks. Transparency sucks. Fairness sucks. It's not nice that content creators have to suck up to algorithm gods. The adware/spyware sucks. The fact that 2007's bogging golden age optimism resolves to this is terrible. Can it really be that the worldwideweb is possible, but blogging is only as resilient as your deal with a hosting company?