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 Archiving might be a good thought at this time.
Dormant accounts may be deleted.
Indeed, and the Wayback Machine has an import for Twitter archives:
https://help.archive.org/help/how-to-archive-your-tweets-with-the-wayback-machine/
@trowzers @me @timbray I had the same issue so I submitted a GDPR Subject Access Request, they acknowledged receipt but haven't fulfilled it yet, and since 40 days have passed I made a complaint to my local authority.
I encourage everyone to do the same. My guess is that Twitter doesn't have a GDPR/DPA team anymore.
@trowzers @me @timbray I've seen reports that twitter does not consistently notify people when their data is ready to download. The recommendation was that people should check it themselves once or twice a day after they submit their request.
One person got their notification so late that twitter had already deleted their downloadable data and they had submit another request.
@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.
hello i am a guy picking an argument on the internet :)
>Twitter captures a real-time historical record of a couple of decades and the billions of individuals’ snapshots are irreplaceable.
i would say a 3rd party site is better for cataloging the content of twitter than twitter at this point, as the future of twitter is uncertain -- especially as we are seeing content go offline in realtime
thank you for participating in my argument
@timbray Hrrm, I've just gone Private, have not and will not delete my account for the reasons you state - but still contemplating deleting my tweets.
I have downloaded my data, thinking about re-hosting them on my own website.
I sure don't want my content contributing to that fascistic agenda, but can keep them available for the record.
Thoughts?
Also, doesn't Archive.org have them anyway?
Very helpful. Thanks (though it needed a slight trim to work for me):
https://help.archive.org/help/how-to-archive-your-tweets-with-the-wayback-machine/
@timbray @jamie I didn’t ever tweet with any sense that I was doing something to be publicly archived. I see it as ephemeral.
I’ve downloaded an archive and completely purged my account. I just don’t feel like leaving my content, including photography, on that dumpster fire of a website. I’m completely fine with being gone and not leaving much of a trace!
@timbray well for small people who never had followers to any given degree choice is easy. Just delete everything.
For @gruber's of the world, they are still hesitant to even leave as they'd lose followers.
Martin Fowler just posted a screenshot of anti-Mastodon link scanner in Twitter's latest war:
Attached: 1 image Remember, you can find me at my mastodon account. I tried posting the link to it, but I got this
Now big accounts are even more screwed because Twitter seems to be preventing people from putting their Mastodon handles even in Bio!
They can't anymore even advertise their presence if they plan to move. Is https://movetodon.org already rendered broken as well?
@timbray @adrianco I think it is important that people retain the right for their twitter history to be ephemeral.
Not everyone uses it this way, but for those who do (including me), it should not be a mark of shame to retain little history.
I’ve been meaning to trim my twitter history for ages, and this was just my trigger.
"He has very strong opinions about dots and something called HTML being generated on the server?"
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