I love this idea: WordPress.com’s 100-year plan. But at $38k, it’s too expensive for most people. I’ve been planning something similar as a complement to Micro.blog, but from a completely different angle.
Rene van Belzen This is like support for life, isn’t it? I suppose the $38,000 is to correct for inflation, which will be quite substantial over 100 years.
Manton Reece @renevanbelzen Good point. I ran the math quickly and it comes out to about $30/month, but I forgot about inflation. Assuming 2% inflation, $5 today is $36 in 100 years. Still seems like a lot if you have to pay all at once or quickly.
Herb Bowie I would like to see some of my content preserved for the future, but in my case I’m talking about static sites, not based on WP.
Francesco Maida Imagine you have a time machine and you go back to 1993. You buy a computer magazine and find an advertisement for CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL promising you your own “memorial” page on their bulletin boards for the next 100 years.
What seemed like a good offer in 1993 suddenly isn’t so good in 2023 isn’t it?
Don Whiteside @manton it’s a nice idea but long/lifetime without some sort of bonding arrangement is just nice words.
Textmate, which became Joyent, was happy to take my aprox 500 dollars for lifetime shared hosting when they needed some up-front money. They were also happy to say it was over about six years later. Not because they were going out of business but for… reasons? Never mind what could happen if a company went through chapter 11 or was sold.
Manton Reece @jasonekratz I wrote somewhere (or said it on a podcast) that the only two companies I think could last 100 years are Automattic and GitHub. It is hard, though, and would require Matt Mullenweg setting up the right leadership to take over when he’s gone.
Manton Reece @donw Yeah, I guess with Joyent it probably should’ve been a red flag that they did the lifetime plan to effectively raise money.
Don Whiteside @manton I dunno. It seemed like that worked fine for that purpose. Kicking us all to the curb didn’t happen till they took VC money/did that merger and I guess someone looked at the agreements and said “we can just ditch this.” Sure didn’t seem related to being unable to afford to offer the shared offering as much as deciding they didn’t have to.
Aaron @manton based on the 4% rule you could take that same $38k and be able to spend $126 per month on hosting and never run out of money.
I like the concept but that seems either priced wrong or it’s for a really high resource usage plan.