While I am harping on the subject of internet social media based on self-publishing rather than large republishing companies like Fbook, Twitter, etc...
I am quite concerned about the raw records that form the history of our times simply vanishing, irretrievably, as people age and die.
In earlier days things were recorded with relative permanence on paper (or stone). Not so today - one's entire life's work can vanish in few microseconds.
Not just the media or the storage of today are impermanent, but we have created a clock-driven scythe in the form of ICANN's utterly stupid domain name renewal system. There are as many potential domain names as electrons in the universe, but ICANN rules require leasing them in 1 to 10 year increments, thus undermining much of the means of referencing our already weakly permanent digital creations.
(I won't harp on how impermanent and fragile are our database driven, dynamically constructed, web pages.)
@karlauerbach people who don't renew domain names due to becoming disinterested, old or dead won't also sustain the servers. The only thing the lack of "ICANN's utterly stupid domain name renewal system" would cause would be a constantly growing mountain of corpses of good domains forever pointing to dead servers or IP addresses that changed hands since, while everyone else uses domains like `domain-name-not-really-this-time927843872.some-other-subdomain.weirdass-tld` which are the ones that actually aren't as scarce as good domain names.
