> "Pocket shut down and took five years of articles with it — I had a vague export that I could not actually open." ^pain A personal survivability pain with a specific trigger: vendor sunset. The worker invested in a tool's specific affordances; export is partial; years of curated material gone, sometimes permanently. Distinct from generic tool migration — this is the *forced*, *terminal* variant where the worker had no warning. ## Discovery questions - "Have you ever had a service shut down on you and taken your data with it?" - "What's the oldest digital archive of your own work you still have access to?" ^discovery-questions ## Examples - Google shut down Google Reader; many users lost years of curated RSS organisation and starred items if they did not export via Takeout in time.[^1] - Pocket's 2025 API shutdown by Mozilla: users permanently lost years of curated saves with no API-level recovery path.[^2] - Dropbox shut down Mailbox and Carousel; users reported loss of email workflows and photo-organisation metadata when the services disappeared.[^3] [^1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html [^2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/future-of-pocket [^3]: https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2015/12/saying-goodbye-to-carousel-and-mailbox