Digital survivalism

A podcast on HPR describes a few concerns similar to my own.  Being old enough to remember the messy end of the dot com era in 2000-2001 I've been wary in the last year or two that "free" services on the internet may not remain free under recession conditions.  Fortunately so far these fears have not been realised, and this is probably because the internet is now a more mature place, with more resilient business models and enough advertising revenue to be sustainable.  In terms of the internet, the world is quite a different place now than it was a decade ago.

Still it looks as if the recession/depression (depcession?) has some way to go, and we aren't out of the woods yet.  It seems abundantly clear by now that the very narrow definition of recessions in terms of GDP is inadequate to fully characterise the contemporary state of the economy.  If the depcession drags on for a few more years, as some commentators suggest, things could change though, and we might see more "free" services disappearing or becoming paying only.  So it's always a good idea to have a plan B, and not allow yourself (especially if you're running an organisation or business) to become too dependent upon services in the cloud and the whimsical nature of their terms and conditions.

So during 2010 I started hosting my own web site, with a Wordpress equivalent of this blog.  If Google were to decide that blogging was no longer cool, or economical to host, or if this blog were to become the victim of a collateral takedown, then I could still continue elsewhere without much inconvenience.  As mentioned in the podcast, the fortunes of technology companies vary from year to year and even the largest and seemingly most indefatigable of the mega-corporations can go into rapid decline if they fall out of fashion.

In addition I'd also like to try hosting a Diaspora site, but it looks as if the Diaspora project made some pretty unfortunate design decisions which mean that for the present it can't be hosted on an ARM based server.  Hopefully that will change in the near future, so that Facebook can be ditched.

All of the above could really be defined as a sort of digital survivalism, or digital sustainability.  It's an electronic equivalent of trying to be self-sufficient in straitened times, but hopefully not quite as loony as building your own private nuclear bunker and sitting on an industrial quantity of baked bean tins waiting for the balloon to go up.  Another advantage is having everything in one place where it can be backed up, rather than it being dispersed amongst a diverse range of web sites.  In theory replicated cloud databases might make backups a thing of the past, but you're really just trusting service providers to ensure that's the case.