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

[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!