Cleaning up
I've been on the internet for quite some time. I remember being hauling phone cables across the room and plugging it into the modem (after first ringing my parents to tell them not to worry if they are getting an engaged tone for the next two hours - I'm not dead, I'm on the internet). I've seen and used them all, from gopher to telnet, the first versions of Netscape, AOL and bulletin boards.
The other day I found an old external hard drive that had bookmarks and password files on it going back around ten years, and I was amazed and astounded to see how many logons I had for sites that I can't even remember, or which have long gone. But also lots of sites that are still around, like Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, Twitter, Medium, and Substack to name but a few.
Some of them still worked, others I had deactivated already. But the time felt right to reconcile my social media accounts in an effort to get some control and oversight into my online presence.
So today and yesterday I deleted the following accounts:
- Tumblr - (my oldest web presence that I can recall)
- Medium - (hate the fact it's basically one giant paywall)
- Substack - (nice, but I never updated it)
- Mastodon - (still have one account, but it's on the kill list too)
- Bluesky - (see Mastodon)
- X - (a few old accounts that I never used anymore)*
- Blogger - (Urgh. What was I thinking of?)
- VSCO - (nice, once, but now no longer needed)
- Pixelfed - (I have Instagram, so this is not needed)
- about four photography Discord servers I was a member of
- Feddit - (a replacement for Reddit, only it's crap)
I still have two X accounts, Threads, an Adobe portfolio for photography, Discord and Reddit. These are probably my most used accounts.
And now this bearblog, of course.
I'm hoping to make this site a more permanent regular (lets see how that goes) blog. If I like it I might pay for a subscription to be able to upload photos but yeah, let's see how it goes.