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Comment by jxf | Hacker News Reader

The handwriting was on the wall for this when Posterous built data export: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/12/28/twitter-own-postero...

I do give them a lot of credit for providing a means to export data (albeit a somewhat clunky one), because way too many services simply shut down without providing a reasonable way to get your data out.

Will also be interesting to see what the "key initiatives" that Posterous will be doing at Twitter are: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/03/welcoming-posterous-team-to-...

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We want to make sure our users can move to other sites easily. If you have suggestions for our exporter, please let me know

The XML file in our export can be uploaded to Wordpress.

This is going to ravage blog links on search engines. Not sure why this wasn't announced a year back (although it was widely known this would happen eventually).

What are the rough operating costs of posterous?

If you want we could discuss keeping it alive rather than shutting it down (like what I've been doing with http://www.Reocities.com/).

I don't like large gaping holes in the web.

Instead of setting up a longer living backup for each case, it would be interesting to setup a generic storage mirror and a corporate foundation that can keep these sites alive.

When a startup shuts down a product, they can donate the domain name or point it to the mirror to keep it alive.

Something like archive.org, with some donated servers and a couple of people working on it.

Twitter and other acquirers usually only want the team, and this is happening more and more. We are losing large parts of the web. I wouldn't be surprised if less than 1% of Posterous is exported and goes to live on in other forms. Either way the URLs and links all die.

I've been keeping reocities alive out of pocket. It costs a few hundred every month in hosting costs and another few hundred in machine write-offs. I got about .37 in bitcoin donations, so I'm a bit short still :) But I think it is well worth doing. I assume hosing posterous would cost a lot more than that so I'd have to find some funding but I'm pretty sure this could be done.

I'd be more than happy to help out if Twitter are willing to do it with Posterous. Register a non-profit and then go out and approach some of the larger co's for funds and/or resources to keep it running forever.

Make static backups of these sites using their sitemaps[0] and then ask them to donate or point their domains

[0] https://posterous.com/sitemap.xml (warning: 1.5MB)

Hm, that sitemap seems to be limited to 10K entries and it isn't clear how it links to the next level sitemap. I'll get to work on this.

Sachin - are you aware of any transfer tools to Posterous's most obvious peer, Tumblr?

Tumblr is not profitable, has a very high burn rate, and has been losing employees. Speaking as a Tumblr user, I really wouldn't move to Tumblr.

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