@woozle Complex views on this.

A challenge of very-large-scale services is that when they die, much goes with them.

I was also on G+. I'd archived virtually all my own content by submitting it to the Wayback Machine, using a script (much of that on 15 January 2019, a few have mutliple saves).

I went through a similar issue and process when Joindiaspora, the original node of the Diaspora* network, shut down earlier this year. Again, I managed to archive most of my content (> 75% of posts, and virtually all the significant ones), at both the Internet Archive and Archive Today.

(The latter doesn't have an automated process, so submissions were manual, though I'd written scripts to at least generate the submission links.)

Part of informational maintenance and hygiene is ensuring that content you link is archived. Internet Archive are working with Wikipedia specifically to do this for web articles, published academic articles, and now books (these will open to the cited page on the Open Library). This is of course awesome.

There's also the issue that not everything needs to be remembered in perpetuity. And much probably shouldn't be. And a system in which content cannot be removed ... also has huge problems.

@atomicpoet @eryn