A whole person online
Recently, there's been reports about Meta disabling accounts seemingly randomly; a friend was a victim of it and it's plunged her into an unexpected despair. There was about 17 years of memories in her account. That's a long time to have been online.
This is one of those moments that made me stop to think about my relationship with these social media sites. Every day I pour data into them. My account holds my conversations with everyone. It's got photos I thought were beautiful or funny. It's got bookmarks of content a sleepy side of me has yet to check on again.
The reality is that Meta is just some American company that's got years worth of my life in their servers. How did that become such a norm? And we're supposed to trust that they'll be OK with holding our stuff for us?
If we are our memories then who do we become when our data vanishes without reason from these corporations? It's bewildering.
Maybe it's time to step out a bit. It's time to start planting in a garden of my own, not borrowed land (But I suppose this blog kinda is something like that, although less creepy). This'll be in favor of more control and a better way to express myself, instead of following a standardized UI for posts dictated by foreign designers.
Let me be my own person online.