At some point during the past couple of weeks the founder and CEO of Tsū quietly, with no warning that I know of, shut the site down. His explanation is the site has served its purpose. “Although we have still have numerous active communities on the site, our mission of changing the social landscape for the benefit of the content creator has passed.” There is a link on the home page to allow users to log in and download their content. There are also links to his personal social media accounts, but as far as I can tell he has given no further updates or explanations. (See update below.)
That is why it is a bad idea to make someone else’s platform the main location of your online presence. Buried in the TOS of any site is language explaining it is the right of the site owners to delete your account or shut down the entire site at any time. They do not have to warn you it is about to happen. They do not have to give you access to download your content. That is true of social media and cloud storage accounts. So while I am active on social media, the home base of my online presence is a self-hosted website in my own domain. I back it up regularly and can easily port it to another web host and/or domain registrar, if I need to do so. While I use cloud storage, it is merely a backup for my local backups. And I log in to other websites using either the OpenID of my self-hosted site or using my email address.
Update, 16 August: The page now explains, “You are probably wondering about the new layout but in fact we have permanently taken the tsu product offline due to the cost associated with running it and our inability to complete the last funding round. We are now focused on retooling in order to launch alternative apps for our community and others.”