i think I'm hurting my brain

This week of yet again playing Social Media Roulette has apparently done something to me. Cross-posted from cohost (actually, I now have two new identities!), because I think I just broke.

The dangers of going back to college later in life and applying to it the focus, obsession, and enthusiasm of a fangirl whose practiced all three of those things for decades (and we're very, very good at it) does have it's disadvantages: you spend an awful amount of time reading code for fun because you're used to doing that kind of thing.

I am seriously enjoying mastodon, and reading the API and Github documentation has told me a lot (including how much I don't know), but it overlapped heavily with a feature that most social media sites don't have but you can do with mastodon because it works in instances; you can transfer your account to a different server.

Of the top of my head, I can't remember the scope of transfer, but you do get to stay effectively 'you' after the transition instead of the usual method: when we join a new social media site, our online identity is brand new and we effectively experience--within the scope of that site--digital amnesia of our entire (outside that scope) online life.

Sure, we have the photo albums and diaries--link back to our old identities--but within the scope of Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, Mastodon (the whole), we start over every time. We're not even permitted a passport; we're always and forever only citizens of that country with no reference to any other citizenship we have, have had, or will have before.

There is, actually, one social media exception to that: Dreamwidth. Off the top of my head, it's the only one that didn't require me to ignore all history that was not created within it; you could fully import your account from LJ into DW. For that matter, it let you keep doing it regularly so your entries and replies were kept synched.

Anyway, back to Mastodon: it does allow the transfer of your account--that being, your Mastodon identity--if you want to join a different server. Which in my social media history is rather new and kind of exciting; I'm allowed to keep my own identity between servers! I get to exist as me and keep my history!

I am allowed to keep my history. I am permitted to keep my identity. The words I wrote, the conversations I had, the friends I made: I must be allowed, permitted, to keep those things, because obviously, I have no right to them. Because quite literally they aren't mine to keep. I've been graciously allowed to download my data from a site, but no other site will let me use it there; the only identity I'm permitted is the one that the site will give me.

I've been doing Social Media Roulette for twenty years, and it has annoyed me every time that I have to recreate myself from scratch at every new site. It's been that way from the beginning, so I suppose it didn't occur to me for a long time to ask why. Now of course, I know why--from the point of view of those who own or run a site.

I am not a site admin, however; I am me. And right now, I have no idea why on earth up until now, I was okay with not actually owning myself and only existing as borrowed, vaguely maybe-related identities within the scope of multiple sites that I will inevitably lose.

I called a vote among the roughly twenty-three different iterations of Seperis, and for your consideration, we submit the following: if the future of social media is not be owned by a single corporation or entity and so cannot be taken away, then maybe we, the users, could own ourselves, both within the scope of the site and outside it. I have the right to my history no matter the platform, the right to my friends, the right to my identity, and not only can I take it with me when I leave, I can bring it with me when I join.

Or...we just keep doing what we're doing. Because that's worked out super well for us.

So sayeth Seperis of Livejournal, on this day in the year of our Lord 2022, born on November 1, 2001, twenty-one years ago, and didn't know she would not be the only, just the first.

Crosspost: https://cohost.org/seperis/post/272559-i-think-i-m-hurting

Comments

[bluedreaming]

We're not even permitted a passport; we're always and forever only citizens of that country with no reference to any other citizenship we have, have had, or will have before.

I’d never thought of social media/online presence in this way, but it’s so true. Such an important recontextualization. The only example I can think of your reclaiming parts of my online life are the photobooks I printed of my Instagram posts before downloading my data and deleting the account - though not first party, I can interpret the book without platform-specific accounts or tools to parse the data. (But comments were not included.)

[seperis]

I've done this jump between platforms so many times, and I was reading how Mastodon works since I joined it and one of the things you could do was transfer your account to another server instead of just creating a new account on a different server. And I was like "okay but why can't I belong to both servers with this one account?" Because seriously, I have an entire bookmark folder just for social media.

Then two things hit me: one, I was complaining about having to transfer my own account when before that moment, no other site (but DW) let me do even something vaguely like that and two--in one, I used the word let. Because no other site gave me that option;they didn't want to so they didn't. Because they didn't have to. Because it wasn't mine.

Twenty-one years on social media and I not only do I own literally none of it, it's so accepted this is right and just that I don't even have the tools to try or context to explain why I should be able to.

It's been a long three days is what I'm saying.

[bluedreaming]

>> Because seriously, I have an entire bookmark folder just for social media.

Exactly.

>> not only do I own literally none of it, it's so accepted this is right and just that I don't even have the tools to try or context to explain why I should be able to.

First the realization, then the processing. This is definitely something I’m going to be mulling over.

A very long day!

[ratcreature]

Pinboard imported your delicio.us bookmarks though not the social connections.

[sage]

Earlier today I was thinking about how much I miss some people from earlier platforms & your post just speaks to me so much.

I've never heard of cohost before so I clicked the link and read their front-page. Are you liking & using it or just grabbing your handle?

[mecurtin]

What mastodon server are you on? I want to at least get on SOMEWHERE, so following fans is the easiest method.

[seperis]

Fosstodon.org: it's open source and very IT. I'm enjoying it a lot.

[sara]

I've been playing with Mastodon this week and I set it up so it links back to DW, because this is still as much home as anywhere and looks likely to stay that way. That seems like a nice feature.

But yes, ideally identity and linkage would be transitable in a way they're not now.

[krait]

This is so interesting to me, because while I'm pleased to have been able to 'port my LJ over to DW back in the day when I moved here, in general I think of the lack of transferability between sites as somewhere between 'neutral' and 'a good thing, actually,' and I'm wondering if this has something to do with how, when I first became part of online fandom, 'fandom' - and particularly transformative fandom - was something secretive.

My first associations with the idea of bleedover between platforms and sites are primarily negative, and commercial: Google wants to make it easy for you to use your Google account to sign into everything, because how else are they going to compile a list of what videos you like and what items you shop for to connect to the keywords in your email and sell to marketers? Facebook would love it if you stayed logged in to Facebook, so that their tracking pixels on thousands of other sites can record your presence there - for the benefit of Facebook, not for you.

On the other hand, I recognise that I have been, mostly, lucky that I haven't lost anything through the separation of my various iterations. I still have (most of) my old email accounts; I was able to download my non-fannish LJ before leaving the site and import the fannish one to DW; I keep backup copies of my fic that's post to AO3; and I didn't have any content on Tumblr to be preserved when I left that site.

I do support the idea of being able - of having a right - to preserve what amounts to personal documents, and would love to see this become a broader topic of discussion in the ongoing evolution of privacy rights, data rights, and social media that's going on in the world. One ought to be able to possess and preserve a record of one's tweets, as one's own intellectual property. And it hurts nothing for another site to offer a way to upload it again there, so long as it's not mandatory! :D

[flowersforgraves]

(here from a link on bluedreaming's weekly roundup post)

Yeah, I definitely feel this way also, krait! It many not be only the time when you joined fandom -- I'm younger than many users here on DW, both age-wise and in terms of years spent online, and the bleedover aspect for me is almost exclusively associated with surveillance (like the Google and Facebook examples you have here). For me joining online communities in general and fandom in particular in the early 20teens, it also brings up a lot of the worst parts of cancel culture and harassment: someone could, conceivably, dig up a fandom thing I said out of context back in 2016 and use it to chase me away from, e.g., a trans support group. Most of the time, I don't desire transferability, though I definitely understand others' wishes for that. Definitely hard agree on that last paragraph.

Fandom Coders

[brainwane]

BTW are you on Fandom Coders? I've heard they may be about to start diving into understanding ActivityPub and it might be cool for them to learn from you.

Yes.

[elke_tanzer]

> And right now, I have no idea why on earth up until now, I was okay with not actually owning myself and only existing as borrowed, vaguely maybe-related identities within the scope of multiple sites that I will inevitably lose.

This. This this this this this. Part of why I burn out periodically on participating online was having to hop locations so many times.

[archaeologist_d]

The thing is that you can't download things from DW to LJ any more because of whatever (which I was doing before). It's not that big a deal. I just use HTML on both locations and it seems to be okay. Glad to hear that Mastodon is doing well. I haven't jumped from twitter yet but did download my history there.