All the posts I ever made? A plea for letting go
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The only social media I'm using these days is the fediverse. I have several accounts on different software for different applications: I use Shareky for micro blogging (i.e. general chatting and blabbering things into the universe), Pixelfed for photos (though I don't really use it and am actually thinking about deleting my account), and BookWyrm for keeping track of my reading and for writing little reviews.
There are many great features about the fediverse. One of which is that you can migrate your account from one server to another. That's really cool. I have done that before. You can take your followers with you, the people you follow, and your personal block lists. I never did the "proper" migration process that redirects from your old to your new pofile, but exported .csv files and imported them into my new account on a different server by hand. So I do not know what exactly gets migrated automatically, and what you have to do by hand. Depending on which software you move away from and towards, things may be different anyway. One thing only Sharkey can do natively (as well as the no longer developed Firefish, and maybe other *key software), is migrating your post history.
A lot of the times when people think about switching servers, or even come from outside of the fedi, like X, Instagram, or Facebook, they mention that loosing all their many years worth of posts is hard and that they would like to take them with them. Fedi software developers have been offering the possibility to import your Intagram catalog to Pixelfed, or seem to be even working on implementing post migration into ActivityPub. There's also Slurp, with which you can move posts within the fediverse onto a GoToSocial server, and theoretically other fedi software as well.
So right now, in certain instances, it is possible to migrate/ import your post history. Nice I guess. But how often do you scroll back through those posts? Honestly, how often?
Me? Hardly ever. There has been one or two times in all the years I've been using social media, and even forum boards before then, when I wanted to find a post of mine again to look something up. But that's it.
I wonder, where does this fear of losing written conversations come from? We've been having oral conversations since humans developed speech. None of those were recorded. Talking is ephemeral. And so is social media. Or at least that's how I see it. What I post on social media is mostly only relevant in the moment. It's a thought I have, an observation I made, a question I have, a problem I need to solve, a rant about something that is anoying me right now.
Yes, meaningful connections can be forged on social media, insightful conversations can be had. But when they happen offline, we do not record them either and they still are as meaningful, aren't they?
And who do you think will read through that backcatalog of yours? I guess... pretty much no one. Not a single person. Because why whould they? Why should they? I for one have better things to do than to look up what you said a year ago, let alone 5 or 10. I do like to look at the recent posts someone made to get a feeling for who the person is that I just met online. But we are talking the last 10-20 posts or so.
All you do when you want to import thousands of messages and hundreds of photos is adding data to your server's storage. Instead, I would like to invite everyone to embrace the ephemera that is social media. Let it go. It's fine. You'll be fine.
And then go and make a website.
- Elena.
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