Social media was an unfortunate side quest

I’ve completed the process of migrating pretty close to everything I’ve ever posted on the internet, onto this website. The only things I left behind were posts that make no sense out of context, so I haven’t brought over the conversational text from MetaFilter or Reddit, or the technical Q&A from Stack Overflow, but other than that if it’s words I wrote, it’s available on this website.

Part of the impetus for this was a general retreat from engaging in the increasingly unpleasant social media sphere — but like the existence of this site in the first place, it’s honestly more an exercise in personal vanity than anything else.

Though it was mildly entertaining to dust off the old web scraping skills to semi-automate the retrieval of my words from various social media sites and older web forums back to this one. Facebook and Instagram made it easy, they have a reasonably good (though well-hidden) export feature.

What I did not do, and probably should have, is record the original source of each post. Not so I could include a link back to the original — they can probably survive without my trackback traffic — but so I could keep track of the different customs and mores from different sites in different eras.

(A “meme”, for example, on 2000s-era LiveJournal used to basically be one of a collection of writing prompts passed around between bloggers so they’d have something to blog about. Later on it became an image-based joke with text in Impact font. These days, of course, it counts as a nuanced political opinion. How things change.)

Some of this stuff was originally written for a private audience, so if you see me complaining about a freelance client know that I wasn’t publicly ranting in real time. I was privately ranting in real time. Very different. The passage of time has sufficiently anonymized the guilty parties — except in cases where that was myself — so I feel ok about hosting those in public here now.

Not that this really feels all that “public”: I know for a fact this site is read more frequently by bots than by humans. Hello, bots. These are some of the words that helped train you. Enjoy.

Anyway, that’s the update. I mention it mostly so that if something seems weirdly out of context, that’s because it is.