The Blog That Disappeared
It doesn&#x27;t really matter whether Google was &quot;in the right&quot; or what the backstory of this case is. It&#x27;s also not a question of bringing this to the attention of the &quot;right&quot; people at Google. This is an issue inherent to the entire system. The problem is that people entrust their work and often their entire public persona to entities that are guaranteed not to act in their interest.<p>I don&#x27;t even think this is about <i>access</i> to decentralized alternatives, after all if you devote years of content to a platform you can probably manage to go through some technical setup pain. Gmail, Blogger, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook - there are self-hosted alternatives out there to all of them, but the big trade-off is that content creators have to shoot themselves in the foot on <i>discoverability</i> if they opt out of the big platforms.<p>Either at some point we will collectively wise up and re-decentralize or we&#x27;ll go further down the path we&#x27;re already on. Our lives ruled arbitrarily by DRM and ToS. I do recognize that I&#x27;m personally part of the problem, it&#x27;s really hard to opt out.