Own your own content

I put a lot of energy into social media in the early days. I juggled Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter; it was a lot. I quickly realised Facebook wasn’t for me and deleted my account, LinkedIn is too corporate and too self congratulatory, Instagram is full of people showing-off, but Twitter stuck.

For all its many flaws, Twitter worked for me. Unfortunately that’s no longer the case, so I packed my bags and moved to Mastodon. I’ve left behind more than 17,000 tweets, which feels like a lot, but the funny thing is that I’m comfortable with it.

For a long time I’ve been conscious that Twitter owned the content we all posted and made a decision that, for me, Twitter was for fleeting trivialities, amusing observations, and letting people know when I’d posted to my blog. I’d never tweet anything unless I was happy to never see it again.

I watched as people took advantage of the longer character count and threaded Tweets to post much longer-form thoughts directly to Twitter, glad that any content I produced that was worth anything lived safely on my own website.

I won’t be using it again, but I have no intention of deleting my Twitter profile or any tweets: I’m not about to break any links to my tweets (after all, Cool URIs don’t change); I’ll leave that to Twitter.

Meanwhile, I’ve downloaded an archive of my tweets, and one day I might get round to publishing them on a subdomain of my own site for posterity. I guess in theory Twitter could ask me to take them down but I’m a very small fish and, sadly, I doubt they’ve got the staff.