(This blog entry is in English because the forum post I'll be quoting below, which is the main part of this entry, is in English as well.)

I have not yet deleted my Flickr account, but simply because of the lack of a decent export tool. I'm writing one myself right now, it will be called <> and will be announced in this blog and on the Flickr forum. It should be finished the next week or so. This is just a short update on the events at Flickr:

After the <> reached 50 pages (that's about five thousand posts!), a <> was created which had no longer the bad word "censorship" in its headline. Germans can now see "moderate" photos again if they want, but "restricted" ones are still not available. I have already written in <> that <> why I will be leaving nevertheless. And now I'm quoting a <> I made that sums up my current feelings about Flickr, Web 2.0 in general and why this incident will go down in history. You may want to read the post of Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield that's linked in the first sentence first.

Thanks Stewart for your post. It will possibly go down in history of Web 2.0, at least in my opinion. Here's why:

What you actually did with your post was to disillusion the people who believed in Web 2.0 as the next big step into a global community. You made it clear that no matter how big the focus on user interaction may be, the whole thing is still run by a big company that has to keep its market share, revenue, advertising and customer lock-in in mind. Users may be valued to a certain degree, but as soon as it's getting too complicated to manage issues effectively (with regard to money spent) or as soon as one would have to stand up against repression in certain countries and try to actually fight for a new "country" called internet, where freedom is the most valueable thing, that value of the users gets limited in order to take no risks of damaging the company.

Don't get me wrong, I can fully understand that Yahoo doesn't want to die because of a few revolting Germans. But on the other hand, don't tell me that it's the only option you had. Digg has earned a lot of respect because of not letting the MPAA censor their users. Tor is actively fighting the oppression in China.

I understand that Yahoo, Google and others are too much "big business" in order to be idealistic enough for fights like these. Flickr is still a great service for unpolitical people who don't care about these things. But the ones who are really behind the utopic, completely free internet, will need to learn that such a thing cannot be created by multinational companies. Instead, we should praise the internet for its decentral approach and create freedom ourselves, as the Cosmopolitic People of the Internet.

Therefore, I'll say goodbye to Flickr. I'm not really looking back in anger (except for the lack of communication in the first days), but I realized that you just can't do better. And I don't hate you for that, I just can't live with limiting my freedom for the sake of Yahoo. If that means that I'll have to invest some work to set up my photo gallery on my own web site, so be it. If that means I'll lose some friends I've found on Flickr, well, that's the way it goes. But I hope that you can understand that I won't be coming back. The internet is about freedom, not about revenue. But that's my personal opinion, not an universal truth, and this opinion will differ depending on who you ask. Flickr will still be able to get new customers, and continue to grow. But it will more and more turn into a big commercial thing like MTV, where the feeling of being a community is sold to people who are satisfied with just the feeling of being able to move something.

Tschüss Flickr, it was nice having fun with you.