I see what you did there, trolling us to debate silos vs the open social web on a silo.

Point by point reply, blogged:

tantek.com
(where it will likely last longer than this branch post).

Dave McClure was right.

But also, the economic factors that would lead to more interop simply aren't there. The [perceived] costs of building another silo'd social network are always lower than building an interoperable one, where you have to wait for everyone else to move in lockstep. Unlike hardware which has a much longer refresh cycle, software is revved daily — and waiting for standards to evolve/keep up with market/product demands is a losing proposition — especially considering the real value that accrues from "owning" a social/interest graph (partial or otherwise).

Really, the economic upside for interoperating — considering that advertising is still the primary way to make money on the web — is just too low.

I thought I heard the sound of leaves rustling on a branch somewhere, perhaps because the factory[1] has been abandoned. Can it be restarted?
[1] downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Yeah, go figure — I host my own server and what happens? TextDrive takes it back over from Joyent and they can't keep the thing running. Is this what it's like to live on the IndieWeb? (I know if I had a server in my proverbial "basement" my site would have gone down a long time). The cloud is dead; long live the cloud!

Chris, that sucks. Latest I saw on TextDrive is about the spinout[1].
I'm fairly happy with Empowering Media (which acquired my previous hosting company 10for10) for tantek.com and MediaTemple is taking very good care of microformats.org hosting.
For more recommendations see:
indiewebcamp.com
I hope you're able to get your site restored from backups quickly!
Would be great to see a write-up from you about the process of doing so (and thus another challenge of the IndieWeb).
Good luck, and plenty more indieweb hosting/advice in #indiewebcamp on Freenode. Hope to see you there.
Tantek
[1] gigaom.com

Yeah, I mean the big suck of this is that I hadn't touched my server/account in ages… I just figured that since I'd bought the "lifetime" account I'd be, y'know, set for life. So much for truth in advertising.

I bought a lifetime pager service account once. Lasted ~4-5 years IIRC. Of course this was before blogging so I didn't blog it. ;)

Is it possible that your server is up, but its IP address changed on 2012-11-01 per:
thewhir.com ?

Also, have you tried tweeting @textism?

Yeah, I filed a support ticket; they're chasing it down. When they migrated my sites from the previous server, they failed to update DNS and then trashed the servers. So, somehow they're going to be restoring from tape (or something). Really has made me lose of a lot of faith in ever hosting my own stuff again.

ouch. hope it gets resolved soon.

"made me lose of a lot of faith in ever hosting my own stuff again"

Really? How long did TextDrive/Joyent host your own site without incident?

My guess: longer than the entire lifetime of >90% of silos, e.g. Pownce, Posterous. etc.

Well, Joyent never really managed my server very well — it was always *very* slow, and definitely was in the low 9's in terms of reliability. I always thought about switching hosts, but it always seemed like too much effort to be worth it. In contrast, I've never had a problem with virb.com (where I host chrismessina.me) but I've always had to manually update my 3-5 WordPress blogs every time a new update came out.

Now that I use my Google laptop for almost all my computing, I no longer have an FTP client handy, or my password — so I don't even know how I'd get access to my accounts. I mean, all of these things are serviceable if I had the time to sort out these details; but therein lies the rub — outsourcing to a "silo" is just easier.

That sucks to hear about Joyent's management of your server. Manual updating of WordPress blogs is a problem and why most in the #indiewebcamp community are pursuing their own solutions.

Re: using Google laptop - do you mean a netbook? If so, I noticed you still found it useful to pick up a 4TB drive rather than trust *everything* to the "cloud": plus.google.com

Perhaps to store your photos, or music?
Why not a backup of your site as well?

No doubt outsourcing to a silo is still easier (in the short term), but I think it's still worth pursuing simpler ways to get setup on the IndieWeb so you can have something you can depend on (low switching costs are important too for situations like with Joyent/Textdrive).

indiewebcamp.com

What do you mean by "their own solutions"? Rolling their own publishing software?

By "Google laptop" I mean, my Google-issued MacBook Pro. I simply haven't installed Transmit and transferred over my OSX Keychain.

The 4TB drive is to consolidate the 4 1TB backup drives I have. I've also started doing more RAW photography and storage is becoming an issue. It's not about "trusting the cloud" as much as the network isn't fast enough for editing 50MB RAW photos in Lightroom!

I have local backups of my blog and do takeouts from the major services I use every few months. Managing those backups and making them useful to me has been elusive.