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People talking about "this is the first time we've ever had a fleeing a sinking ship situation online" and that just tells me folks are relatively young, never had a BBS just go down and not come back up (The sysop posts on another local board that they had a drive crash but should be back up next week. That is the last anyone hears from them. Years later, you learn they moved to Vancouver.), never had their ISP discontinue dialup service when they're in an area the telco won't support for ADSL (You move to OtherNet but lose your email address. You fire up Eudora to try to get everyone you know to update their address books. They don't.), never lost a news server (They were the last in town to offer Usenet access. The few providers out on the net that offer posting access are too expensive for you. You should email your friends from ASSC and RATMM to let them know what's up.), never had an IRC network fragment (EFnet splits in two over a technical disagreement on how to handle nick collisions. Half the folks in your channels are from the European network, the other half the US/Canada side. You see the US folks twice more but ultimately stay on the European side because the Finnish folks are helping you with your thesis.)
Not that I'm diminishing how much it sucks but this has been the norm more often than not. The era of Four Websites seems to be failing and we're seeing infrastructural issues as well. This will not be the last time; you'll learn to keep multiple lines open, to make your own presence and to start scoping out where you go next when things start looking shaky, not when they've already collapsed.
