| "google never made it clear it would be temporary" Why would you ever assume any service is permanent? "The broken trust comes from the idea that google likely promoted this as something that will be a new ongoing community" Anyone who "trusted" that a free service would work forever is being unrealistic. "they try to build up communities then abandon them with no recourse" They're hosting open source content. You can fork that. Anyone can fork it. If your content were hosted on Poly, you could use Takeout to download all of it in one go. "that are now scattered again because they trusted google" If there's any blame here, I would think it would be that there's not a group of people (like us at HN) who work closely with sites like Poly to back them up before they are shut down. Once we have a track record, we can ask Google to say not just, "We're shutting Poly down," but "and it's moving to Hacker News Back Things Up .com." If someone wants to bridge that gap, moving this content to the Internet Archive or something, that sounds worthwhile. |