If you’re going to leave Twitter, please don’t
a) delete your account, because someone bad will steal your handle
b) delete your Tweets, because their existence doesn’t help Elon and it’s like burning the Library of Alexandria.
Twitter captures a real-time historical record of a couple of decades and the billions of individuals’ snapshots are irreplaceable.
The thought of all those tweets being erased makes me feel physically sick.
[please pass on if you agree.]
@timbray I agree with A but (for me) not with B. I have long delete all of my twits and likes after N months for the same reason that I close comments on my blog posts after N months: nothing good can come of those late replies: no community, only bots and monetization.
Anything of substance (you know, the *quality* fart jokes) are on my blog. I'm not one of those "buckle up" goofballs. I know HTML and several other languages.
@jwz Not giving any more.
But my real-time comments on, for example, the Afghan war and Sinead O’Connor tunes, are not worth much in a spreadsheet but them plus millions of others along similarly random lines probably have stories to tell that I'd hate to lose.
@timbray Absolutely, and that is why I hope IA is on the case. Though I know they probably don't have most of it, and that's sad.
(Prior art tragedy, e.g., the usenet alt hierarchy is almost completely lost to time because contemporary admins thought it wasn't "serious" enough to spend tapes on.)
But if you twitted something last year and IA doesn't have a copy of it yet, they're not gonna. And if the only copy of it is on Musk's disks, it has already been consigned to oblivion.
@allaboutgeorge @jwz @timbray this is the best option!
The Internet Archive is the safest home for long term storage. After uploading to IA you can remove your content from the birdsite with a clear conscience w/r/t archivists.
@jwz @timbray
I'm also `A | ~B`
Imperfect, incomplete solution to 'B' is for those of us with our Twitter archive before wiping our Tweets can reconstitute them online somewhere: our own site, the IA if they add support, CC0 collective data lakes, I dunno I made that last one up.
I'd like to experiment with an immutable mirror of my former Twitter self as a Fedi/Masto instance. It'll be annoying like hearing 50% of a phone conversation.
I think the conflicting interests of digital preservation and a sort of right to privacy to be lost to the sands of time is a worthwhile part of the Fediverse discourse, too.
I'm moved by say, the loss of a timestamped archive of the Jan 6 attempted coup. I'm also moved by marginalized folks who don't want a forever archive of their online behavior for abusers to take advantage of.
I'm interested in seeing what fedi patterns emerge to address this.
@timbray @jwz indeed, but I think the only hope for real continuity of that data in is Twitter's own DBs, where likely nothing is ever truly deleted. But it's hard to know if there will be continuity months from now, let alone decades or centuries.
I certainly can't fault individuals from rescinding the use of their own data in this mess.
Tim Bray
jwz
George Kelly
C. Scott Ananian (he/him)
toolbear#🪧
Kelsey Jordahl