Another 1001 tweets
My Scheherazadean tribute to twitter became timely again with another 1001 tweets written since those that I could, on the previous occasion, only trace back down to 2014. This time, a higher engagement with the platform allows me to overlap with the online record that is, at the time of writing, kept up to 15 March (2017) (a tweet commenting "It does not need to be imagined, it needs to be written down."). All tweets actually seem to remain accessible, if they are referenced. These are, for instance, my first & second tweet, and my third one, one year and a half later. Follows below a selection among the last thousand or so written since then.
What strikes me most is the number of "deleted tweets" and even more so, of "suspended accounts", which leaves quoted retweets (I seldom "only retweet") with no context. I have been increasingly annoyed by the censorship on Twitter since then but it is my understanding that recent developments might be changing that (?!)
of the material archived, and not trusting the platform which is basically rewriting the past with its cherry picking of what can survive and what cannot. A real scandal. I didn't follow much the recent developments to form an opinion of whether it's going better or worse, with only a rough intuition so far that more freedom is better, but that when this is promised or secured by one person or company, this is also bad, so which of the bad or good prevails, who knows? Maybe this Mastodon thing goes in the good direction, but I haven't figured out yet what this is. At any rate, I created an account: https://mathstodon.xyz/@laussy, not with much enthusiasm to actually do anything there, but until coming events cut us off the internet, it will be difficult to completely obliterate one's participation to it. It probably will also be useful for future historians to get a snapshot of everybody's mood when "that" happened.
To look on the brighter side of things, I do find that these sporadic memories are preciously recorded in this random sampling timeline. Although it always feels a bit uncanny at the time of posting them, this makes for a great recollection years afterward, provided they won't be lost, dumped or confiscated by the host. I like a lot, in particular, to be reading again the tributes, written on the spot, to people who left us, famous or not, as our own lives carry on. That resonates differently, but no less deeply, years after.
So I'll probably keep tweeting, hoping not to attract too many followers, to retain as much as possible a feeling that I can talk truly to my future self without risking to annoy or shock the nosy people who had the misguided idea to follow me. So I hope nobody is reading this except myself in 2 or 10 years time. David probably is.
