Something that bothers me about social media.
You don't miss people who disappear from your feed. They don't leave a hole like they do in other contexts. You can see the person who is no longer in their usual place, the classmate who isn't in class. You can even see that someone isn't updating their blog anymore.
But the feed has no hole that is left unfilled. It just rolls on, utterly indifferent.
@dl I'd say that this is a feature only evident on centralized social platforms like Twitter, but I already know at least three accounts here on Mastodon that just don't exist anymore. Banned and deleted for being too bothersome and mentally ill.
Thankfully though if servers die, their toots can live on and still be retweeted.
I don't have the patience to run my own server right now but I really want to so I can remember my friends.
@dl someone that I have over 600 tweets with deleted their Twitter today, or was forcibly removed.
Entire swaths of ideas and a friendship I built with them: just gone.
Myriad of tweet storms and conversations full of meaning lost to eternity. Blown away like test of an ancient relic disintegrating into sand like they never existed.
@dl I miss them.
@dl I stopped linking to other people's content when I realized that they would just blink out of existence when a platform deleted them.
I use my social media as a sort of collaborative mind map, and I feel the holes.
Watching my Network slowly evaporate as accounts die off is deeply traumatic to me.
I wish I never started using it this way.