Post #870754

2026-03-31 09:26 UTC

I wrote a new blog post! ✍️ Lighten your load: The power of treating social media posts as ephemeral A social media post&#39;s window of relevance is extremely short. But being hoarders by nature, we have a hard time letting go of our post history — much to the delight of AI scrapers and enshittificators. Here are a few thoughts on the benefits of traveling light. https://blog.bestiaexmachina.com/why-social-media-posts-should-be-ephemeral #NoAI #enshittification #SocialMedia

Replies (6)

@derthomas@metalhead.club 2026-03-31 09:33

@bestiaexmachina I absolutely agree with you in all points and yet I don't use autodelete, simply because I want to keep my metal journeys. I could go back and fav or bookmark all my related toots to save them from deletion, but that's tedious af. And who favs their own toots anyhow? I raised a feature request to allow saving toots with a specific hashtag from deletion, but it will turn 3 years this June and I doubt that it will be ever implemented. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/25619

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@molentum@mastoart.social 2026-03-31 11:13

@bestiaexmachina Totally agree with all of this. One feature I wish Mastodon had was different autodelete time delays for different types of posts - I keep sufficiently popular art posts around so that new folks can see what I do from my media tab, but I'd love if I could set those to go away after, say, a year to save space on the server. But I never got around to thinking through it enough to make it a feature request :neocat_up: Maybe I should just manually delete old stuff from time to time

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@doombloomart@mastoart.social 2026-03-31 11:39

@bestiaexmachina Thank you for this post. I just set mine to a year for now to begin with, may become more brave later on. Really I have a hard time with this even though I have nothing to lose: all art is on my computer anyways, yapping posts are just blurted out on a whim. The only thing I would lose is the evidence of the interaction I got. But the interaction already has taken place, and the evidence of it is less important than the fact that it had happened.

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@markmetz@sfba.social 2026-03-31 11:44

@bestiaexmachina @rameshgupta Liking this idea… And thanks for the guide to moving servers.

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@Hadeur@metalhead.club 2026-03-31 11:47

@bestiaexmachina

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@vadhakara@mastodon.social 2026-03-31 12:18

@bestiaexmachina I'm going to try this out and see how I feel about it later. I don't think I've ever posted anything anyone might classify as important for preservation anyway.

Open ##1586306