Want your images back? That'll be $5
lutr.dev
lutr.dev
And I'd already made peace with losing those $5. "It's time to relive them for just $5" didn't really sound like you can get them back, in my defense.
You know ...that is how we managed to offer you such a cheap subscription...
Your data is already training data. If they promise to delete everything from their models or those elsewhere that they made the data available to, even if you pay, I'd call them liars.
One of the big companies, Meta, already decided to go ahead and grab terabytes of pirated books to feed their LLM. [0]
Therefore I would not give them (or similar entities) the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how they might use text that customers "gave" them under some unreadably-favorable terms of service.
With PII, the pirated-books example is doubly-relevant, because the accusation of "this output is reproducing my copyright work" is very similar to "this output is revealing my private data". The fuzzy black-box nature of the algorithms offers ways to stymie enforcement, arguing that victims or regulators cannot conclusively prove a chain of cause with zero coincidences.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...
https://apnews.com/article/google-smartphone-surveillance-ve...
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
Yes, actually: The blame or bad-reputation for that waste goes to US copyright law and its inanities.
Those worked very for Uber.
1) We know that legally privacy terms to data are still binding, and those worried about it are freaking out over nothing,
2) We know that those contracts are null and void, and there are no restrictions on what can be done with that data beyond blanket legal protections to such biological data, or
3) It's an open legal question
I don't understand the legal terms of something like this in bankruptcy, if the data are seen as being separated from the contractual obligations that acquired them.
I’m gonna bet a whole lot more money has been made off corporate apologists who say “that would never happen” about things that definitely then happened.
Wonder how many “conspiracy theorists” warned people cigarettes were causing cancer while corporate apologists pointed to the faked studies of the industry and said “See, they are all crazy, no company would sell something that they know causes cancer! It would be a huge risk!”
If they are PII then under GDPR they are obligated to delete the data.
If not then they will be liable to pay fines up to $20 million or 4% of their total global turnover.
Fines can be up to €20 million or 4% of global revenues…, _whichever is greater._
Just like my state law says simple littering can be punished by up to a $6500 fine. Most people get a warning or maybe pay a fine of under $100.
I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened already, but I guess there hasn't been enough unscrupulous LLM companies selling those "anonymous" chat logs yet.
I had gone through a whole process probably 2 years ago now to "recover" my account that I lost the original email and forgot the password. I eventually got into the account before they paywalled it, and procrastinated downloading everything because I couldn't find a good way to do it in bulk.
Interestingly, you can request the download, and then just NOT delete your account, which is what I plan on doing out of spite. My 81MB of ~600 cringe avatar edits from Gaiaonline circa 2007 will forever take up that tiny space on their servers as they hope and pray that one day I might toss them $5.
Does Photobucket make it clear that this is an option, or did you discover it by accident? I don't get that sense from TFA. If it was unclear, this is still a shitty dark pattern. The wording implies that in order to "relive" your images you must subscribe...
Only once you get to the final page of account deletion does it give you a single link that says "Request data download" or something.
Photobucket emailed many warnings over the course of multiples months saying "Your account will be deleted in X days" with a prompt to subscribe to keep your account.
At the time they were sending the emails, you could still login and download your photos (that's what I did). It was all very transparent.
The fact that the author missed these emails isn't really photobucket's fault, IMO.
(But not giving a preview of the account you're reclaiming isn't a good UX obviously, not going to defend that!)
So these are the unfortunate circumstances. This post basically shows what's it like to be a living and breathing edge-case (missed e-mails & no images in your account).
This actually made me think about the edge-cases I must have shipped at work and how they're affecting people.
I'd love them to delete my account because there's nothing in it, but apparently it's just an outright scam
So tired of the games everyone plays to squeeze $5 out of someone.
Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize, and was sold to Fox and then offloaded to some no-name startup called Ontela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket). The service could have been shutdown completely and the harddrives fed into the shredder. Instead some former PE vulture did the math and figured out that preservation might make some money. You _can_ access old Photobucket images (when it works) that would otherwise get a median of 0 hits a month, while the rest of the internet succumbs to linkrot. Seems like a win-win for everyone involved.
2004 is when that was typed. I'm not sure that that social contract ever existed. We just didn't understand how "free" services worked.
Gmail also dates to 2004. If reading your email to sell ads to third parties based on the content of your private correspondence doesn't fit that attitude, I don't know what does.
I stand by my assertion that this shit was always going on, we just weren't wise to it in the 2000s.
You could claim that google in the 90s was about building something cool and making money later, but not 2000s google.
As an aside, "make something cool, monetize later" is exactly the problem. It's deferred evil. The people who wrote the check to have youmake something cool aren't paying you to make something cool, they are paying you to figure out the monetization down the road.
That's basically what Web 2.0 was.
You got a Pentium III and a DSL connection? Run a website! Run an IRC server!
when you make a contract with facebook or any other large site you're making a contract with a legal team tasked with protecting their money
at a certain point scale only works through oppression
Are you saying that the free websites in question owed their users completely free storage of that data, in perpetuity?
How is that a reasonable expectation, regardless of how one viewed "Chad"?
I can agree that that would certainly be nice. But like, with the exception of those who remained in continuous profitable operation, most free sites will end up shut down or sold, so either the data will be deleted, or someone is going to be paying for servers continuously to preserve that data forever. No one will do that and expect $0.
I'd also add that I am pretty sure of all random things uploaded to random sites 20 years ago, 99% of it is either content no one cares about today, or content that the uploader kept on their own disk or their paid cloud storage.
And I expect a professional business to protect my items less long than Chad.
[*] assuming chad doesnt lie about having my stuff as OP claims in this case
> (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)
The rest of your comment kind of assumed that OP paid for the images and then got them.
I did not assume that OP got the images. That's why I explicitly called it out. In my first sentence. And again in my second last sentence. Jesus.
The case of not having images is really obvious.
IIRC Photobucket actually made a good amount of money through their advertising business unit ("Give free storage and get paid by ads" was their business model). They were acquired successfully by Fox for $300M in 2007.
Ontela was a photo-uploading app provider in the pre-iPhone era. When Fox decided to spin out Photobucket (as a fallout of the MySpace debacle), the two companies got merged.
It's likely running on the original infrastructure from acquisition, is full of EOL dependencies, and likely wasn't well-secured to begin with even before the takeover.
Any changes to regulatory requirements are also likely ignored. The EULA is probably full of all sorts of falsehoods about how they maintain the site. ("We use commercially standard methods to secure and blah blah blah ...")
Keeping these kinds of zombie sites online is not a win-win situation.
You answered your own question :)
> Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize
As in, failed to turn free users into VC returns by selling their data or forcing them into a subscription model
> former PE vulture did the math
Self-explanatory
But it's okay. Getting those $5 back would make Photobucket look slightly better in my mind, and I don't want that.
I use a debit card and I wasn't even sure you can do charge backs with them. But yes, apparently!
As a company there is just no point in fighting them. I even had emails of clients they made a mistake and didnt realise it was our payment, but even that wasn;t enough.
I think that's if you're lucky enough to receive an early fraud warning, in which case, you have maybe ~12 hours to refund the money, but who knows, it's completely opaque to the merchant. As a merchant, I've even had previously refunded payments become disputes hours after issuing the refund.
Most of the time, the charge back is sprung on the merchant without warning. It can be worth fighting some. I've successfully countered several, it feels like I win maybe around 50% of those that I counter. I usually counter when the reasons are nonsensical, such as "Subscription renewed after cancelling", yet there was only one payment for the subscriptions creation.
To add insult to injury, Stripe charges an additional fee to counter the dispute (which you might get back if you win).
The whole process is infuriating. Charge backs are a tiny % of transactions, but cause a large amount of distress. I can't see why Stripe / banks don't offer an early dispute window, in which the merchant has say 7 days to refund without penalty. If they ignore or decide not to, it becomes a standard dispute.
If we get our dispute rate down, might consider trying fighting it again, they are always our lowest tiers of 19 or 29 usd. So not really worth it. Just frustrating it's such a terrible process on our end. Also twice users are open to withdraw it when I contacted them, yet their bank / card doesnt make that easy or possible, so they still count to our dispute rate.
I’ve been sold counterfeit or defective merchandise on eBay thrice in the last year. eBay’s guarantees are totally worthless even with evidence, and it was like pulling teeth to get my bank to do a chargeback. In one case they wouldn’t at all.
Sure. Now provide a notarized statement showing THEY agreed to those exact terms.
Cause guess what... they cant prove shit.
I don’t know where you’re from but this isn’t the case in any normal country at all.
People always treat ToS as some god-given mandate that’s valid just because it’s written somewhere, but in reality there obviously are limits to what you can enforce.
You can’t just circumvent customer protection laws by denying them in the ToS.
As it stands, they offer "Takeout" for free. This process gives you hundreds of zip files with the photos distributed into deep subfolders by date. That would be forgivable if it weren't for the fact that they revert all their processing and deduping, leaving you with 20 copies of the same file scattered in random places. To make matters worse, if you try to download more than two zips at a time, it throws an error and forces you to start a new Takeout request. You then have to wait 24 hours for an email telling you that you can try downloading the zips all over again.
I just assume the project manager responsible is a Dark Triad personality whose sole goal in life is preventing people from ever leaving Google Photos.
My current strategy is to chisel it down by using the Google Photos search function to show 100 files as a time, which I download as a zip, then delete those 100 while they're still selected. That way they are somewhat organized and still deduped, unlike the mess that Takeout gives me.
I had always thought that fixing outages was one of the least appealing parts of software engineering, but so many SWE blogs seem to have built blogs in ways where downtime is inevitable.
Unless there is an extremely good reason not to use one, a static site generator works perfectly well. Next, there are many 3p services which will display that site for free. GitHub pages, AWS free tier, I’m sure there are plenty of other ones.
Importantly, and relevant to this article, the files live on your computer. You can mirror them in any number of repos if you want, but it is not possible for any 3p service to hold them hostage.
I am thoroughly convinced that this is the right way that I’d even go so far as to say it is a best practice for roll-your-own blogs, and any sort of issue like the article describes is a direct result of not following that best practice.
To me, ideally the end result is a chargeback instead a customer support refund. Otherwise they have no incentive to change. A high chargeback percentage could be that incentive.
I think the credit card companies expect you to attempt to talk it out with the merchant first though, so you'd still want to reach out to customer support first to "give them a chance".
Chargebacks don't tell the full story, telling support "Hey you told me to pay $5 to see my pictures but there were no pictures. Give me my money or I'll file a chargeback" has a better chance of making it up the chain and changing policy. A chargeback on its own could mean any number of things and it's easier for management to write it off a "just fraud" or similar.
If you just want to screw the company but potentially not encourage them to change = Immediate chargeback
If you want to try and change the company's policies = Support + Chargeback if not fixed
I'm not making a judgement call either way, I think both are acceptable in this scenario. I'm just pointing out that if change is your real desire, the support route has better odds.
[0] https://docs.stripe.com/disputes/categories?dispute-category...
Look through old email to figure out what email address they had.
Attempt to log in, no memory of password. Get reset link sent to my ancient Hotmail.
Hotmail doesn't recognize this device because I haven't logged in in a decade. Send an email to my hotmailspam@my-domain.com that I apparently set up at some point to confirm my identity. Have to enter multiple confirmation codes.
Log into Hotmail, click link to reset Photobucket password.
Create a new password, put it on my vault.
"Failed to reset password Firebase: Error (auth/the-service-is-currently-unavailable.)."
Perfect. No notes.
"if you ever need a copy of your data, members can always request and download their content, including original files, through the Flickr Data section of your settings."
There is no such thing as a corporation being conscious or taking a will of its own and choosing to be greedy. It’s just a symbol to represent humans being greedy. Let’s call it what it is: it’s human leaders and bourgeois people being greedy. I don’t find it honest when we continue to use inaccurate phrases in this deceptive manner since we don’t want to look at the situation for what it really is. Or assume our responsibility in the matter.
We’ve allowed this greed by tolerating it, interacting with the humans (or not) and pretending the reality isn’t what it is. What is complaining and stopping there asking about it? Surely we can do more than just make an internet article about it and think it will change.
If you’re like me and don’t want to be an “admin for life” then it’s still for you.
What has worked for me for over a decade is to keep the source of my photos in a boring old folder (backed up to my synology and Dropbox). And then layer photo viewing and sharing apps on top.
The day I’m sick of Immich and there’s a better alternative, I switch.
I’ve written about how it works as I’ve gone along. Recommend reading and putting your own twist on it.
https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
In fact I'm also using Immich and it's amazing! It's as good as the Google Photos app, but you own your data and can more cheaply upgrade your storage, if needed.
On that old Photobucket account I was hoping to find screenshots I made as a kid. Didn't store actual photos there, thankfully.
It was ahead of its time. Glad you're still working in the photo sharing space!
I’ve preserved all of the tags and albums from my Trovebox library. Had high hopes of integrating it into Western Digital NAS devices but…big co :/
I dislike Docker Desktop for Windows, so I run it in a docker container on Windows Subsystem for Linux with Tailscale and have configured it to automatically initialize all of it when my PC is powered on. It took me many hours and lots of chatting with GPT to get it working. Perhaps my configuration is uncommon though.
My biggest issue with it is the overhead and lack of smart configuration. For example my wife and I have the same mobile device (Android) and we can't share an account while having backups made at the same time because backups mimic the default android images folders and both devices have the same structure. If we have two different accounts, then each account generates its own thumbnails and you have to run facial recognition on each one individually (which required a lot of manual tagging). This wastes a lot of time and space.
The second problem is it can't just work with the file system structure and organization I have in my external folders "as-is". You basically have to recreate them as albums inside immich yourself. I found a handy script that did this for me, but the experience is somewhat lacking.
Third issue is I can't backup to external folders. Backups go to the default immich folder and I have to manually pull them out of these and dump them in the correct external folders (recall that I have my own file structure).
I've gone to their github and luckily there are issues out on all of these which I promptly upvoted, but I'm not sure any of them have been resolved by the team yet. I'm hoping they get fixed soon.
Edit: I should mention that I don't enjoy having a bunch of different services running to get this working like an out-of-the-box experience should. For example adding Dropbox to the equation is a no-go for me. The idea of adding even more system resources dedicated to this function is a huge turn off. I also use a cheap DAS (not a NAS - and yes I do manual backups for offsite storage) because I don't want to fork out a fortune for the Synology solution. These are all things that Immich itself should be able to handle without having these complex systems with multiple failure points.
> The second problem is it can't just work with the file system structure and organization
I presume you know about storage templates and ruled them out.
Honestly, if storage costs were an issue, I would have preferred they delete it with notification than sell hope at a ransom.
Wonder if there any startups that have grown without resorting to these low blow tactics - just the idealised free market of "we provide such a good service that you're willing to pay us our fair price".
The fact that they did delete it, and then tried to sell access to bupkis, is just the icing on the scummy corporate cake, eh?
If the images actually were on the account and they deleted them, it would be crazy.
I'd argue that it is objectively scummy.
That money they want back!
From somewhere, any way, pimping the EBITDA and ARR numbers to the expected one for the 5-7 years resale cycle or such. ARR needs subscription, and if you have user lock in - well, otherwise you wouldn't buy some trivial service like this wouldn't you? You counted on the lock-in, that is central to you 'business model', or more like exploitation - then try cash it. Now! You can alienate people down the line? Let that be the problem of the next owner of the product, you will cash out soon anyway. And next PE look at the price/ARR ratio mostly, anyway, it will be a fine add-on to some other PE target at least, if the ARR ratio is fine.
PE is shitting where it eats.... and others eat too ... ruining it for everyone. Don't care. Why don't they buy oil or beef farms or whatever, why they need to ruin the internet too?
That kind of long con is (and has always been) part of the basic business model of most of the "free" service providers on the internet.
First one is free, played on a decade time scale, works fine in a world where capital is quasi-free.
The hyperscalers play it a little more subtly, but the principle is the same.
But that's a very different product. I was only saying I don't think the PB thing is getting anyone rich, rather it's probably bringing in just enough profit to keep whoever owns it from shutting it down and deleting the (S3) "bucket." As such, it's arguably a nice favor done to the few people who uploaded stuff to this site and are ever coming back for it. The alternative is for the stuff to have been long since deleted.
There's no indication that the original blog post author ever actually contacted Photobucket. Nor, would I believe, anyone in these comments tried to. We're just people on some small, isolated corner of the internet letting some dumb SaaS product ruin your day.
"lol, u mad?"
Edit: I see now that there were actually no photos to restore. A second question I wondered is if I could get at those long lost photos (I'm sure they were physically deleted back in the day).
I also lost all my old Yahoo accounts because I didn't log into them for >1 year. Same for a lot of videos I made on a nice little site called GoAnimate. So keeping data is better than removing it! Even charging a fee feels fair-ish.
But forcing me to sign up for a subscription on an account I don't actually even have any data? Weeeelll, this doesn't feel so nice :)
In theory a copy of the emails are on a harddisk, but its control board melted, and when I got the same model disk (to transplant its control board onto the disk with data), I couldn't find the original disk...
I don't want to self-host my photos, too much management.
I don't want to use Apple or Google or MS Clouds for various reasons.
I do want to support a pure-play, independent-ish, profitable, consumer friendly platform. To upload hires shots and have them easy to tag/share/access among those to whom they may be of interest.
I expect to pay, but not through the nose. Reliability matters. I would want the company to be around in 20 years and still reasonably priced/useful. Suggestions?
I dunno https://immich.app is pretty painless IME.
It's free, I've been using it for ~25 years, you know the drill.
However, I lost access to it when I bought a new phone, and everything didn't transfer over. I couldn't reset the password without buying the 'premium' service, it was only $10 or $15, I was able to cancel after (so I wasn't re-charged next year or month).
IMO the main damaged party here is everyone who comes to old forum threads and finds lots of inaccessible images (or images watermarked to the point of being unusable). But then again it was never reasonable to expect image hosts to provide a free service forever.
I don't even have an account with photobucket but I fully feel the pain of this user and I got outraged just by reading this.
I think this kind of SaaS business is going to go the way of the Dodo very soon.
Some of the emails specifically mention that there’s 35 photos, so at least mine’s not empty.
I’d assume that at some point the emails must cost more than $5?
It's not a footnote or smallprint, it's written prominently right above the button so people are well aware of it...
It's hard to remember with all the ownership changes, but the Photobucket era was really a different time, of "it's your data, you're in charge, and we give you maximal control of it" - people would upload there to post elsewhere, and I recall they ran ads to monetize. But this era had the ethic that uploading was expensive, and you'd maybe want to do it once and have control of your stuff after that.
Now we have photo hosting services that barely work on the web (iCloud), or work only within a walled garden (Instagram), and I do miss the "it's your stuff, we're just a website" kind of attitude from the mid-2000s.
You're remembering that if you uploaded something to some free site in 2001, it was still there in 2004. That was because the same people and companies were still around 3 years later, it wasn't because they cared more about you than 2026 startups do. Sure, 2004 Photobucket may have cared more about us than 2026 Meta does -- but I doubt 2001 AOL or AT&T cared about us more.
[1] I only mean most of the content uploaded to Photobucket 2 decades ago is completely useless and abandoned with no one ever coming back to look for it. Memes or screenshots posted to forums that themselves have been offline for a decade. And just content that people don't remember even creating.
1. Customer took the initiative to check out a long-dormant free photo hosting account
2. Found that it required payment with a message implying strongly that the count of photos in the account was >0
3. Customer didn't like the idea of a subscription of any kind, but eventually figured out that you can just download your crap and cancel
4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty
5. Customer cared a lot about his $5 but apparently only after 2 days had past since this incident
Of all this, only #2 is annoying -- it would be best if they didn't use the call-to-action implying you have photos on the account when the count of photos is zero. I can see though how that wasn't built -- the question asked in a meeting about this upsell feature would have been, 'who are all these people who have Photobucket accounts with zero photos, who come back after a decade to log back into them?'
Most sites from the 2005 or 1999 eras of VC money funded "Free" services simply shut down and deleted everything, many without much warning. For the 99% of people who are logging into an old photobucket account in 2026, sure, nobody needs to actually start a recurring subscription, but if you expect that they should store your stuff for 20 years and should never ask for a cent is the same attitude I had as a teen Napster user. Clearly the amount of value the customer is getting is "greater than zero" so about $0.25 a year for long-term archiving of photos is just fine.
Empty does not equate to unused. This was their old account that they definitely used.
This is a lot more believable (esp since he said it) than a conspiracy that PB deleted all photos and built this whole system just to steal $5 a pop -- especially considering how few people must be trying to get back into their 2-decade-old PB accounts in 2026. Hardly seems worth the effort for a scam.
And almost everyone born after 1980 created their first online accounts while they were a minor, including I'm assuming 70% of Photobucket users.
The e-mail account was fully emptied after 1 year of inactivity (with warnings and what not, to other addresses I stopped using). So Photobucket was way nicer than Yahoo from this point of view!
but charging and knowing you don't have any data for this user is a big NO NO
Pretty seedy move. That, and what appears to be the dark pattern of prompting for payment first, then ultimately allowing export after refusal.
Selfhost with Unraid and Immich.
$5 recovery in small claims court maybe? :)
[k]
When signup is one click, and cancellation requires a phone call... then I'm right there with you with the pitchforks!
A monthly subscription to regain access is questionable to me, since it'd mean they are still storing the images. A one-time fee could be justified for the cost of recovering the data from cold storage, but risks incentivizing intentionally luring in users then unexpectedly holding their data as leverage to have them pay up as a business model.
Claiming a user can pay to recover their photos, while not actually having anything to restore, is misrepresentation.
Our policy is a subscription grants you write access to your account, but read access will always be there even after you subscription expires. We are still working on policies around long term data retention though.
For my actual chilhood photos, I'm using a little self-hosted Immich that's nicely backed up as well. Hoping that doesn't get hacked!
Around 2017 they started charging, and I honestly hadn't used it in almost 10 years. But I managed to download all my photos - I can't remember what the trick was, but it was ridiculously easy to get around their racketeering nonsense back then. Then they incessantly started mailing about photos being deleted.
It is a textbook example of scumbag behavior. Wouldn't surprise me if they wholesale sold photos to AI companies, while making the same photos unavailable even to paying customers.
What value you put on memories is a good question.
(The companies exist to help corporations recover million dollar risks and price their time and equipment to match that market, not boomer memory lane)
Not "You transfer all copies to us, and erase your backups". The "protection" part is making sure the whole world doesn't see the copies you gave them. This "problem" is so old, it should be taught in pre-k by now. Sharing != backup. Friendly reminder to backup your decades old Gmail account before something like this happens too.
And a chargeback costs them like $20.
Article 15 says you have the right to request the data and they must provide it to you.
Article 20 says you have the right to get your photos back in a machine readable format.
Sadly, this only applies to those in the EU. Americans can keep taking it, which makes sense as it's an American company that's giving it. Sigh.
Technically, you don't have to be from the EU. You just need to be in the EU (which includes Americans who are just vacationing in the EU).
If I understand it correctly, the GDPR applies to any company that does business in the EU and it doesn’t even matter where the data subject is located or which country they are a citizen in. So even if you’re from the US, you should be able to make a valid GDPR request.
But I’m also not sure that they only have to give you PII.
The GDPR also covers data portability, so preventing your data (not just personal data) from being held hostage.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
But as seen by the recent rejection of Stop Killing Games by the EU Commission, society has apparently decided that more money means you should have more say. So the corporations (who would absolutely go to the extremes in terms of ensuring that they don't plateau and instead make more money than last quarter) become the defacto government.
Corporations are not people in and of themselves. They are groups of people at best (and with the way generative AI is going, that's not even guaranteed long-term). There are certain benefits to counting corporations as people for certain parts of contract law, but there is zero benefit to conferring free speech rights on the actual corporations themselves.
Meanwhile, the current US administration is all about finding whatever grift they can attach to and enrich themselves at the cost of founding values.
The biggest thing that pushes me towards idealistic communism is the actions taken by Western society. Maybe that's where we need to use the blockchain and related technologies, to enact the principles of communism without having the state be a proxy for the people. A documented, nearly unfalsifiable share of the means of production means that they'd have to resort to the $5 wrench to be evil in that context, instead of the massive corruption that historic implementations of communism have suffered while the frogs slowly boil. At least it might be a start, I don't know. I just know I see the path the world is taking, and right now the entire Western world is devolving into a weird techno-fascism that locks out any free thought
You’re incorrect.
I was there, too. These dynamics were eminently foreseeable.
I do agree that the smug take here is overall unhelpful for someone who was young at the time, and is now even using a self-hosted solution. It's also fine to say that you personally weren't concerned, were distracted by the gobs of money programmers were getting paid to build centralized services, thought that the developers with ethics would hold more long term sway over companies, and so on. But don't act like it was unknowable.
“if you didn’t want your computer data to disappear, you should have used paper” gee, I didn’t think of that, I’m glad I had someone to point it out, said no-one, ever.