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@feld Another thing is that you have to have enough warning to be able to export those backups before the site goes down. So even if URLs / timestamps / signatures / media were all resolved, not knowing that coolsite.com was closing until it happened would cause content loss. (Now, I am aware of Zot's account portability, but AFAIK this still has to happen in advance of needing it.) And that's ignoring bandwidth and processing power of uploading a multi-GB export file.
Also, all of this requires someone who has both technical knowledge and time. J. Regular WebUser is NOT going to do this, and we should stop pretending they will.
Honestly, I downloaded my data from Twitter once. Then I decided that Twitter was the only site that had any use for the data, and they already had it. Likewise for pre-pumpio Identica. If other instances involved in conversations wouldn't agree that me@newpage.net was a participant (instead of the original me@coolsite.com), those uploaded posts would cause strange errors for anyone who clicked a URL that led back to another server that held original participants.
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Let's say you have a website at coolsite.com. You may or may not own that domain.
For some reason out of your control, coolsite.com is gone or shutting down forever. You move to newpage.net and start putting your content there. You even import your old content.
But all the links to your old content are broken forever and there's nothing you can do about it.
Do we throw our hands in the air and exclaim that "websites are dead, this will never work"?
No, because it's clear that they still work fine after 30 years of this happening over and over.