I appear to have been writing obituaries for social networks for the better part of a decade, one at a time, without noticing it was a series. So here they are together, with what each one actually cost me.
Google Plus, October 2018
I wrote about G+ when the shutdown was announced. The striking thing in hindsight is how little I minded. Google Plus was the only one of these where I never really moved in, so when it closed there was nothing to get out.
Lesson, such as it is: the platforms that hurt when they close are the ones you were productive on. Somewhere there is a version of me who put real effort into G+ and lost it, and the only thing separating us is that I could not be bothered at the time.
IFTTT, February 2019
The smallest entry and by far the most instructive. I published a post titled, in its entirety, an observation that the IFTTT link had broken.
What had actually happened was that an automation quietly stopped working and a chunk of this site stopped receiving things it was supposed to receive. No announcement, no shutdown, no obituary warranted. A service simply changed and my site was collateral. There was no drama at all, which is exactly why it took years to appreciate that this was the important one.
Instagram, April 2021
The post was called “Ugh Instagram” and I stand by the analysis.
This is the one that eventually did real damage, but not in the way I expected. It was not the algorithm or the ads. It was that the plugin I had used to bring photographs onto this site had never actually saved the photographs. Years later every one of those posts was an empty box. That has its own post and I will not repeat it here, except to note that the platform did not have to shut down to take my content with it. It only had to change a URL.
Twitter, March 2023
I downloaded the archive. That is the whole of the post and, it turns out, the whole of the correct response.
Twitter is the only one where I acted before rather than after, and the difference is enormous. I have the file. I have not looked at it once, which is fine. The point of an archive is not that you read it, it is that the decision about whether you can is yours.
Bluesky, November 2024
Which brings us to the current one, written while it is still alive, which feels like tempting fate.
I do not think Bluesky is about to collapse. I thought that about the others too, at the equivalent point. What I have changed is the assumption underneath: I now treat every account on a platform I do not control as a broadcast channel with an unknown expiry date, and I keep the original somewhere I pay for.
The pattern
Five entries, and only two of them involved anything actually shutting down. The rest were services that carried on existing while quietly breaking the thing I was relying on.
That is the part I got wrong for years. I was watching for shutdown announcements, which are loud and give you notice. The real risk was never the funeral. It was the maintenance window nobody told me about.
So the rule I now use, which cost me about fifteen years to arrive at: if the file is not on a disk I pay the bill for, I do not have it. Everything else is a link to somebody else’s decision.
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