The internet is becoming more and more centralized.
Technically anyone could set up a server, a webpage, or make a data connection to anyone else (if you ignore NAT routers for a second)
But the trend is not peer 2 peer, the trend is going towards centralized portals. Millions of people are dependant on just a hand full of webpages to a degree that their life would be severely impaired if those webpages would go down.
What would you do, if google would go down (or blocked in your country, like in China) taking with it Gmail, search, docs, social connections, youtube, even your precious files you stopre in the cloud, the app store for your phone, ..., ..., ...
What would yo do if Facebook went offline. Or LinkedIn?
That would have a severe impact on the social life of many million individuals. But yet they went into this dependency willingly (granted there's a tiny bit of peer pressure, too)
It can get worse. If you make a living on-line with your art, you depend on your platform for advertising client interactions, portfolio showcase and messaging.
Your monthy income might depend on the likes of Inkbunny, Deviant Art, Sofurry, or Furaffinity.
Let's looka bit into the latter example.
Large web platforms have a heritage, and a grown proprietary code base. The larger that gets, the older it gets, the more buggy it becomes. For every thousand lines of code, you can generally expect one hidden undetected security flaw. If you do regular audits and code reviews and put painstaking effort into security it becomes one in ten thousands lines, but from a certain complexity on the bugs are always there. There's always one more. Security critical bugs are found in code that's twenty years old and been open source the whole time!
That's why even sites using an open source content managment system are hacked regularly. Even though thousends of people search through this code to make it more secure, there's also thousands of people searching for flaws they can exploit. And they have to find just one.
FA was hacked using a generic security flaw in a common library, but the attacker downloaded the entire code base and distributed it. It's out there, somewhere, and people can now search for flaws. One person already found a flaw, and used it to delete FA's database, that's why the site went down. Now they are reportedly doing a code audit.
Don't expect it to come back soon. A proper code audit can take weeks. It might be quicker to rewrite everything from scratch. It would definitely be saver to rewrite everything from scratch in a case like this, because you will never find ALL security flaws. It's a task like finding ALL needles in a landfill of used paperclips that are bent into all kinds of shapes (including straight like a needle).
FA will either stay down for a few months, or if it comes back sooner, it will go down again after a relatively short time because they missed a needle, and someone else found it.
But it's not just FA, and it's not just hacks you need to worry about. Changes in ownership, legal troubles, political influence and a million other factors could affect a site, its availability in your country or its availability to you, personally. Sometimes they just change their business model and whatever your most used feature was is now premium only, or discontinued, or "improved" in such a way its now completely unusable.
Sometimes, someone complains about you, and you end up on an admins wrong foot. I'm not even going into FA specifics on this topic. People have had their google and facebook accounts blocked because of unjust complains of others. Their youtube account suspended because of a wrongful copyright claim, lost all their ebooks on amazon because they dared to read them from the wrong country, or gotten their account frozen on paypal because one single client refused to pay.
Half the youtube links I click on, all I get is "this video is not available in your country!"
Did you know that if you try to access your gmail from abroad, google thinks someone is trying to hack the account and won't let you in before you haven't "confirmed your identity" with your cellphone and all sorts of things you might not even be able to?
These things happen. They happen on a daily basis, and they can happen to YOU!
So long story short, heed this wakeup call.
Make sure you stand on more than one leg - be it your emails, social internet, and especially anything you need for your work and income. Make sure you are not dependant on <insert favorite platform here> to get in contact with commission clients or artists, at least get their email as well.
Put your portfolio, or at least some of it on at least two platforms so you can be found and contacted if one goes down.
And if you can, get your own webpage and host your stuff yourself. That way, even if furry porn was outlawed in the US and all the sites went down, yours will still be found, and you can be contacted.
(Let's not forget there's a presidential election this year. And we all know who's a candidate.)
