Getting rid of crap is very satisfying. Especially large piles of stuff that maybe once had value, but now just reeks with the stench of rotting, wet discard food.
Pressing the dump lever was quite easy. In fact, after dumping, I went on, and forgot that I had done this.
Done what?
It was actually November 15, still while I was away in Brisbane for the OEGlobal 2024 conference, I logged into the site I will only ever call twitter, and pressed the button. I did not even screenshot, this is from my browser history.
There’s not even explaining. A year before I deleted the app from my phone, I logged out, and just walked away. Maybe every other full moon I might log in as I was still getting a few people (looking at you Alec Couros, you know my email!) trying to reach me. Seeing poop like this did not engender much nostalgia.
I had heard that November 15 was the deadline to leave if you did not want your tweets sucked in for AI training. That was actually something I did not care about, if someone wants to generate nonsense from my nonsense, go for it.I was fine just letting the old stuff linger. I had so many of my own tweets embedded in my blog post, I hated the thought of creating all those embed holes (actually not much is lost since once WordPress cannot autoembed it leaves it in as a blockquote).
It honestly was a spur of the moment, why the _____ not?
While digging through the maze of links in settings I found this tidbit marking when I entered the place. And isnt that nice, the keep track of my IP address. How handy. What do they use it for (I recognize the range for my location when I lived in Strawberry, Arizona.
Of course you cannot actually do the full dump. You “deactivate” meaning there is a window you can climb the mountain of remorse, and get back into the fray.
But I forget, so it just went into the wind. There it goes:
Weeks later I spotted in Mastodon Billy Meinke talking about the indecision of leaving Twitter and not wanting some one to come along and squat on his deleted account. I had seen it happen to my friend Terry Greene when I check a link for him and spotted that his @greeneterry Twitter account had changed a wee bit.
To be honest my stake was so low in Twitter, I might be weirdly flattered to have my old @cogdog taken over by a bot with a tie. But I had a little bit of curioisty… so I went back, and created a new account! It gave me something like @cogdog3734 (with an unused email acccount( but I remembered there was a setting to change the handle.
So I have easily dumped all my tweets and left a blank, tweetless presence to take up space. Now I can log out and forget about it. The reader is left to their own curiosity to look.
I do have to say it seems strange that the first suggested person to follow, for an account where I entered do information, is @courosa?? How is it possible?
No creepy factor at all, eh?
There it is dump and backfill, and close the hole.
Featured Image: Dumping the Tonka Truck flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Waaaaah? That’s super creepy!
Also, I need you on something other than email. Email is my no fun place and I want you in a fun place.
There’s a new app you can get on your phone that lets you enter a string of numbers that allows us to have two way audio chat. Green icon.