Today's gentle side project, because I'm at home sick, is finally killing off my Twitter account. Not because I've remained active over there all this time - god no, I functionally bailed on that dumpster fire years ago - but because that task is so relatively unimportant it's been waiting for a low-energy, low-stakes day like today to happen.
There's a few threads to come over, a few dangling anchors around the internet to update. Some fun stuff will get posted in the coming few days.
One meta-thing to come over is the realisation I had that paying a regular subscription to use a service is actually the right thing to do. If your Mastodon server admin has a link somewhere to throw them a few bucks a month in return for being there, please do it.
"If the service is free, you're the product" works both ways - if you directly support the things you use, they are less likely to resort to extracting value from you as a means to survive.
Have you ever walked around your home town, early in the morning on new year's day? You might see one or two cars on the road, you might pass a sweaty jogger thumping by, but by and large it's an eerie ghost town sort of experience.
That's Twitter, today, looking through my post history for nuggets to bring across. Half the accounts I've interacted with or boosted are long gone. My last post was quoting someone else posting about Twitter's anti-trans stance; that account is now suspended.
Nothing on the internet is forever.
Oh sure, you might toot something funny that gets pasted all over Reddit and Threads and achieves some level of semi-permanence. But Reddit is well into the private equity value extraction phase, and I don't actually know anyone who even uses Threads.
Like Twitter, every website you use today was made by somebody, and like Twitter, every website will go functionally extinct some day. It's transient data on computers made by people, and those fail, in time.
Putting my stuff on more decentralised networks, owned by people like me, seems like the better bet. I doubt digipres.club will hit the PEVE phase any time soon, so it's pretty safe. But it's still run by (lovely) humans, and the fact I moved here after initially landing on Fosstodon says something about the transient nature of websites and people.
I still stand by my strategy for picking a Mastodon server - find one aligned with your interests that has a long-term financial plan.
There's other lessons to be learned, basic traps to avoid in order to prevent huge swathes of your stuff becoming suddenly and unexpectedly unavailable or offline.
Don't fall into the engagement trap of posting in one place, but linking to another you hope people visit more. One of my tasks today is to more verbosely explain something I uploaded to the Internet Archive, *on* its page on IA, rather than linking to a Twitter post I thought would stand the test of time.
I once registered a very cleverly named website, using the TLD of a country I'd had nothing to do with, for one of those cool project ideas that never really went anywhere. I paid for it for a couple of years, then realised I wasn't ever getting around to it, and shut it all down. Or so I thought.
A while ago, I got a nasty email from that registrar demanding years of back pay. They gave up after I politely told them to pound sand, but I wouldn't be brave enough to ever visit there, now.
Lesson three: Avoid link shorteners. You're just building another point of failure into whatever you're doing - any URL that gets physically printed is now entirely dependent on that service remaining online, forever, in addition to whatever other service it *actually* links to.
We don't need link shorteners anymore. Entering a URL is no longer a chore on any modern device. You can literally tell your phone what website to go to now. It's extra risk for the sake of vanity and it's silly to do.
QR codes are a fun topic. They're just a machine-readable image with robust error correction that contains text, and can be flavoured stylistically for fun or branding.
The image on this post is a QR code containing all the text of a previous post in this thread. I guarantee that the phone you're reading this on is capable of reading this enormous graphic. They don't have to be tiny anymore, big ones are perfectly readable. Don't make QR codes with link shorteners, just put the full URL in it.
To create that QR code, by the way, I used free software. Specifically, this free software, made by @julian - https://fietkau.software/qr
You should bookmark it for later. You might want it, some day in the distant future. I did, today.
The last lesson on my mind is that while you are alive, while you exist as a functional entity, The Website is not the source of truth - you are. Maybe the URL is what gets cited in a publication, if you're lucky enough to make something useful to science, but it's still just your words, your stuff, what you made - and while you exist, The Website is not the last word on the topic.
If The Website goes down, it's not the end of the world - you choose another and put your stuff there instead.
There is nothing sacred about The Website. When you pay your Mastodon server a few bucks a month, you're not buying a lifestyle, or a parasocial relationship with other people you can @ there - you're buying a place in space-time where you put your words, and hope someone finds them useful or funny or insightful or inspiring. But eventually the space or the time runs out.
If Man is made in the image of God, He must be pretty damn temporary; and so it must be with data that We create.
And I think I'll end it there, clearly I need some lunch and maybe a lie-down.
Did you find this thread useful, funny, insightful, or inspiring? Boost some or all of it as you will. That's what keeps the ideas alive.
If you take one thing away from this thread, let it be this:
Tip your Mastodon server admin.
So going through my old Twitter accounts: I had one that is what this account used to be, one personal that I'd had since the beginning, and a handful of alt accounts.
My original personal account is gone without a trace, some time after 2022 (possibly I deactivated it myself but they don't appear to email you when you do that?). My alts were easy enough to find again and nuke. I have a short trail of threads to fully adapt to here, after which I'll nuke my last Twitter account.
I may have left it too late to fully separate from Twitter, my personal account is still visible but support insists there's no such account by that name anymore and I'm welcome to create a new one.
That email also says "Reply above this line", which is sortakinda standard for dated, inflexible CRM software, but also states "Please don't respond to this email, as replies are not monitored". That is no longer a fully functioning system of support. It's abandoned.
Tim 🎮
helpsterTee
Jake in the desert