Since commit hash 407092067c60db1967704f3f0217adf0af8df618 a new feature is live on mataroa.blog: monthly auto-exports via email.
One can enable it through the blog settings, and what it does is it sends you an email every month with one attachment, a zip archive of all your blog posts in markdown format.
This is the third feature towards enabling mataroa users to escape vendor lock-in (from mataroa itself):
- Export blog anytime in markdown/Zola/Hugo sources.
- Redirect mataroa blog subdomain to the user's new blog domain.
- Automatically and periodically store an export of the user's blog on their side.
How is this useful?
Store on the user’s side is a very important part of this feature. We can—and do—offer up-to-date on-demand backups/exports of a user’s blog. But, that’s not good enough.
Backups are a way to mitigate the risk of data loss. Maybe we have the most robust system in the world; we still want backups, so that our users don’t need to trust us.
On the technical side, sending the backups via email to the users means that they don’t need to care whether our server is available or that they can access it when they decide that they want a backup.
But this feature is also useful in mitigating non-technical risks. If we receive a government takedown request, we will comply, as the law abiding citizens and company that we are. If a user has turned this feature on, though, they don’t have to worry about losing all their work. It will have already been placed on the cloud of their personal email.
Isn’t that awesome?
Of course, this is only a step closer to internet utopia and not internet utopia itself. Maybe said user’s email provider deletes their email account too. Maybe said user loses access to the network that connects them to their email. Maybe the internet collapses. We still haven’t tackled those. But, it’s a step :)