2017-12-20 10:53 | https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/99206247716252048

I just deactivated some really old accounts I had on birdsite, ones I'd stopped using years ago, but had left up as a sort of archive... The last relics of a bygone era, of a personality long dead... A mark of my former selves.

Makes me think about the fact that nothing is truly forever, not even the internet and the data we think will last forever. At some point, the final copy of any given data will be deleted. Or it will lose relevance. Or it will slip into obscurity.

Of course, it was already not as I had left it. Accounts I had once conversed with, deleted. Maybe some of those people met the same fate as their accounts. Who knows? A lot changes in three years.

I can't back up the DMs that have been deleted, and the only copy of the replies are in the notification emails sent out to an inbox of a Gmail I'd long forgotten I had.

Kind of a heavy feeling.

The pictures will be gone in 30 days, but I can't help but think of the pictures lost forever from Twitpic or Yfrog or all of those other image hosts we all used before image hosting became a standard part of any web app.

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2018-03-07 04:05 | https://mastodon.social/@trwnh/99640641359436224

twitter's culture since 2014 has been so machine-oriented, they probably trust machines more than actual people. like "i don't want to hear what's wrong, i want to know what The Algorithm says is wrong"

essentially, right around the time twitter decided it wanted to be a media company instead of a conversational platform. it cracked down on third party API usage, put in absurd 100,000-user limits, and started breaking everything that was good pre-2014.