What's yours, and what's only borrowed.

In 2016, Twitter announced it was shutting down Vine, its short-video app, and by early 2017 it was gone. Creators who had built an audience and a name there moved on. Some went to YouTube and kept going. Many started almost from scratch.¹

Eight years later it happened on a different scale. In April 2024, a US law required TikTok's owners to sell it or see it pulled from app stores. In January 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the law unanimously, and that weekend it went dark in the US for 170 million users.²

What's really yours

A profile on a platform is a great place to meet, but its rules are written somewhere else: who sees what, when, and how long it stays there.

What's truly yours is what keeps existing when the rules change: the knowledge, the method, the direct connection with the people who learn from you, and something you built with your name on it.

Your audience meets you on a platform. What you build should live with you.

And the other side

It's worth saying this too: platforms are the reason most creators have an audience at all. They gave a stage to people no institution would have, for free, from day one. Building on a platform isn't a mistake.

And most platforms don't shut down. They change: a new algorithm, a new format, a new policy. The everyday risk is smaller and quieter: something you don't control decides what happens to what you built.

What this says about you

Ask yourself: if your main platform changed tomorrow, what would stay? Your audience will find you again. The question is whether there'll be somewhere for them to go.

Vine's creators didn't do anything wrong. They just built a house on someone else's land.