It seems that you've forgotten a critical element of forums: their community.
I can back up all the data on Reddit or Twitter and I can jealously guard my hoard of posts and Tweets and memes like a dragon guarding rubies. But who's going to come read them all? Who's going to post? Who's going to create an account, twiddle with their profile, add a cute avvie?
The whole point of forums and social media is building a community around them. If Hacker News deleted every post and every comment and we had an unrecoverably blank website tomorrow, we would still have thousands of users to post and rebuild it. If dang banned every user and deleted every account and shut down registration, no manner of hot spares or offsite backups could save us, he'd be a jealous dragon sleeping on a mountain of sparkling rubies.
And community-building is the thing that's caused the problem depicted in TFA. If you build a really nice walled garden, then a community flocks to it and sets up shop and builds little dollhouses there. Successful centralized social media builds communities and keeps them loyal.
Something like Usenet built communities around a protocol and an abstraction: anyone could join Usenet from any connected computer, and post using their email address. Their posts could be distributed everywhere else and synchronized. This is the kind of ideal decentralized community that we've lost in the intervening years.
TL;DR: all of the content of closed, centralized services will be lost in the long run. Choose the platform you contribute to wisely now instead of learning through more large data loss events later-on.
the author's main concern is data loss, hence backups
I can back up all the data on Reddit or Twitter and I can jealously guard my hoard of posts and Tweets and memes like a dragon guarding rubies. But who's going to come read them all? Who's going to post? Who's going to create an account, twiddle with their profile, add a cute avvie?
The whole point of forums and social media is building a community around them. If Hacker News deleted every post and every comment and we had an unrecoverably blank website tomorrow, we would still have thousands of users to post and rebuild it. If dang banned every user and deleted every account and shut down registration, no manner of hot spares or offsite backups could save us, he'd be a jealous dragon sleeping on a mountain of sparkling rubies.
And community-building is the thing that's caused the problem depicted in TFA. If you build a really nice walled garden, then a community flocks to it and sets up shop and builds little dollhouses there. Successful centralized social media builds communities and keeps them loyal.
Something like Usenet built communities around a protocol and an abstraction: anyone could join Usenet from any connected computer, and post using their email address. Their posts could be distributed everywhere else and synchronized. This is the kind of ideal decentralized community that we've lost in the intervening years.