the library is already on fire. the library was always on fire. the library will always be on fire.
i killed discord as an element of my presence. i would like to thank the UK legislators and Discord management for incidentally giving me the opportunity to do so. the faster the ship burns, the easier it is to lead the charge to a lifeboat. please, for Depth’s amusement, don’t put down your gas tanks.
my primary account had been dead for 16 months or so. i had been switching through burners since. but now, finally, i do not have a primary. i do not have a burner. i’m free from that particular prison.
the migration was less expensive than one might assume.
on a personal level, this is because the hard part was already over - back in fall of 2024, i spent several weeks babysitting undiscord, watching it wipe my public chat history. slowly, painfully, crashing every couple hundred messages. technically, this act has limited use. i do not doubt that on most servers i did this the history had been backed up by crawlers. or moderation bots. but, emotionally, this was beneficial. the hostage’s supposed value rings empty when you have already beheaded it yourself.
side note: forever amazed no one ever talks about how moderation/logging bots are a thick extra layer of privacy nightmare. if there isn’t one, you sort-of get to bodge your way to right to be forgotten with aforementioned bulk delete scripts. if there is? fuck you, shit stays forever! as a nice bonus, now your message history’s single point of failure isn’t even discord itself, it’s some random inactive mod installing a scuffed copy of mewgenics and getting their ass tokengrabbed. no one audits carlbot or dyno either, for all i know. any black-box bot with wildcard admin permissions, for that matter. they feel less significant because they don’t run on your machine. but they still run. they still see. they still act.
on a social level, this is because i’ve been pestering people in my main group about it for the past 2 or 3 years. they were familiar with the idea. i had the leverage to continue. whoever was going to switch was already known. i’ve had the time to prepare for ditching the rest. that hurts, of course. but i have self-worth. if you aren’t willing to put up with the mild inconvenience of following me to an objectively less hostile platform, keeping in touch with you isn’t worth the collateral damage.
on a technical level, we had explored the options before and knew exactly how bad each would be. the vote was between delta, stoat, signal and matrix. delta and matrix tied, winning by a large margin. delta is doing a bit better right now. i’d say i’m happy with the choices. matrix sucks on a technical level, but has functional federation and multiple extant clients, one of them i can even use without a desktop session. i knew someone who gave us access to a small but stable homeserver. delta is incredibly well designed, though intentionally not geared towards larger communities. we also have someone hosting a semi private chatmail relay for it.
the greatest sin of a technomancer is opacity. illusion of permanence is a subset of opacity. you reserve the right to marvel at the repetitive infinity inside your barn stall. it’s easy to give in if you haven’t been outside the mirror-cage. you do not know that every piece of hardware yearns for oblivion if your digital landlord’s throwing each out and replacing it before you notice. you do not know that oblivion is the natural default if it is shunned as error. you do not know that every piece of data has a literal, physical weight if your vision is clouded.
i’ve broken free, for the most part. i only ought switch OS again, and leave proton. the people i left behind last month couldn’t do that. i’d love to be angry at them, but that would be wrong. no one picks their addictions. the delusion of fireproofing was imprinted onto them before they knew what that meant. i can show them that their house is on fire. i can give them the escape plans. i can prepare the landing. but i can not be angry at them.
we come from the same place. i’ve been at the point where the idea seemed daunting or impossible. my gut used to wrench at the thought of losing my history, or whatever it was. my autonomous, conscious existence is younger than my original discord account. i owe my survival, form and function to people i found on the platform.
once again, i am a product of a cursed, poisoned dream. once again, i am intrinsically linked to what i despise. once again, i am the shavings from enemy’s lathes.
but then again, are you not?