Staying Findable

Staying findable is the practice of keeping a stable, reachable identity across the web's churn: a URL and contact path that survives platforms shutting down, accounts being deleted, and friends losing touch. The dead accounts pile up: “Last online 620 weeks ago” is what happens to the people who never left a forwarding address.

Adapted from Last Online 620 Weeks Ago on brennan.day.

A personal domain is the durable locator. Platforms die, instances shut down, and handles get abandoned, but a domain you control can always point to wherever you currently are. Oxford Internet Institute research projects that dead users will eventually outnumber living ones on platforms like Facebook: a growing share of profiles belong to people who can no longer be reached.

The IndieWeb answer is the domain of one's own: own the address, keep the address stable, and let everything else (hosts, platforms, communities) be replaceable infrastructure behind it.

• A URL you own that you treat as permanent. See Hosting & Domains.
• Redundant copies of the things you publish, so the content outlives the host. See The Long Web and Offline Knowledge Preservation.
• A contact path that does not depend on one company: email at your domain, or a listed set of current accounts.
• A way to leave well. When you leave a platform, leave a forwarding address. See Deleting Corporate Social Media.

• IndieWeb
• A Domain of One's Own
• The Long Web
• The Internet as a Place
• Hosting & Domains
• Deleting Corporate Social Media
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