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.

To further poke and prod at Twitter, I'll point out it uses its own link shortener at t dot co. Visiting that page, you're greeted with the following message:

"X uses the t.co domain as part of a service to protect users from harmful activity, to provide value for the developer ecosystem, and as a quality signal for surfacing relevant, interesting posts."

The "Learn more" button leads to this article, where they're a little more verbose about it: https://help.x.com/en/using-x/url-shortener