I’ve been building a scrapbook of social media, a place where I can save posts and conversations that I want to remember. It has a nice web-based interface for browsing, and a carefully-designed data model that should scale as I add more platforms and more years of my life. As I see new things I want to remember, it’s easy to save them in my scrapbook.

But what about everything I’d saved before?

Across various disks, I’d accumulated over 150,000 posts from Twitter, Tumblr, and other platforms. These sites were important to me and I didn’t want to lose those memories, so I kept trying to back them up – but those snapshots had more enthusiasm than organisation. They were chaotic, devoid of context, and difficult to search – but the data was there.

After so many failed attempts, my scrapbook finally feels sustainable. It has a robust data model and a simple tech stack that I hope will last a long time. I wanted to bring in my older backups, but importing everything wholesale would just reproduce the problems of the past. I’d be polluting a clean space with a decade of disordered history. It was finally time to do some curation.

I went through each post, one-by-one, and asked: Is this worth keeping? Do I want this in the story of my life? Is this best left in the past?

That’s why I started looking back over fifteen years of a life lived online, which became an unexpectedly emotional meeting with my younger self.

The Internet as a teacher

One thing I’d forgotten is how much I learnt from being online, especially in fannish spaces. My timeline taught me about feminism and consent; about disability and the barriers of the built world; about racism in a way that went far deeper than anything I’d encountered before. I could learn about issues directly from the people who faced them, not filtered through a journalist’s lens. Today I take that social awareness for granted, but the Internet is where it started.

Social media was a crash course in humanity – broader, richer, and more diverse than anything I got from formal education.

Once I learned to shut up and just listen, Twitter let me follow conversations between people whose lives were nothing like mine. I got the answers to so many questions I’d never even known to ask, and I miss that. I stopped using Twitter after it was bought by Elon Musk, and I have yet to find another platform that replicates that passive, ambient learning.

Questioning and queer

More than anything else I saw online, queer culture has shaped my life. I’m queer, my partner is queer, and so are most of my friends. There are so many people I’d never have met if social media hadn’t introduced me to this world.

When I was realising I was queer, it all felt very difficult and angsty. Looking back, I can see myself following a classic path – talking to queer people, being a loud and enthusiastic ally, then starting to realise there might be a reason I cared so much. I went through it once when I realised I wasn’t straight, and again a few years later when I realised I wasn’t cis.

My younger self was oblivious, but it’s all so obvious in hindsight. I cringe at some of those older posts, but they helped me become who I am today, and I want to keep them.

I was annoying and rude, but I grew up

There are other posts I look back on with less fondness. I’m embarrassed by how annoying I was when I was younger. I spent too much time on self-indulgent moralising and pointless arguments, often with people I probably agreed with on almost everything else. I wanted to be right more than I wanted to listen, and that got in the way of useful conversations.

Those arguments were worthless then and they’re worthless now. Deleting them was a relief.

Among my less admirable behaviour was the performative outrage toward the “main character” of the day – the unlucky person whose viral tweet had summoned thousands of replies explaining why they were a terrible person. Looking back, it was a symptom of misplaced familiarity. I was reading a stranger’s posts as if I knew them, projecting motives from scraps of context, and joining dogpiles to fit in with the crowd.

Despite ruffling a lot of feathers, I was only the main character once, and in a small corner of the tech community. It was still an unpleasant weekend, and I got off lightly compared to some of my friends – but I’ve never forgotten how quickly online attention can turn to anger and hostility.

Learning about parasocial relationships helped me behave better. I realised how often my reactions were shaped by a false sense of intimacy, and how easy it was to be cruel when I forgot there was a person behind the avatar. I shifted my attention towards friends rather than strangers, and when I did talk to people I didn’t know, I tried to be constructive instead of showing off.

When I joined Twitter, I admired by people who were smart. Today, I look up to people who are kind. I’ve come to value generosity and empathy far more than cleverness and nitpicking.

The ghosts in the posts

Looking through old conversations, I see the ghosts of friendships and relationships I’ve since lost. Some of those could be recovered if either of us reached out; others are gone for good. A few people have even passed away. I don’t know where most of those friends ended up, but I hope life has been kind to them.

I’ve passed through so many spaces: the PyCon UK community; fandoms like the Marmfish and the Creampuffs; the trans elders who supported me during my transition; the small, loyal group of blog readers who always left thoughtful comments. Some I lost touch with while I was still on Twitter; others I left behind when I left Twitter altogether.

As my interests changed and I moved from one space to another, I often did a poor job of keeping up the friendships I already had. I’d pour my energy into chasing new connections in the spaces I’d just discovered, neglecting the people who had been there all along. That neglect is stark when I look at it over a decade-long span. It was sobering to realise how many more friends I might have today if I hadn’t taken so many past connections for granted.

I’ve tried to keep lingering traces of those friendships by saving my mentions as well as my own tweets. Here’s one I found that made me cry: “One of the things I miss the most from my pre-pandemic Twitter timeline is seeing @alexwlchan traveling on trains and taking train selfies”. I miss that culture too – selfies were such a source of joy and affirmation, especially in queer and trans spaces. I miss seeing pretty pictures of my friends, and sharing mine in return.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, a lot of my remaining connections there were broken. Some friends went to other platforms; others left social media entirely. I was one of them! I still write here, but it’s a more professional, broadcast space – it’s not a back-and-forth conversation.

I miss the friendships I had, and the ones that might have been.

What I choose to remember

I started with 150,000 fragments, which I reduced to 4,000 conversations. A lot of it I was glad to forget, but there are gems I want to remember. I’m glad I’ve done this, and it reinforces my belief that social media is an important part of my life that I should preserve properly.

Curating these memories has made them feel smaller and more manageable. The mess of JSON files scattered across disks has been replaced by a meaningful, well-organised collection I can look back on with a smile.

What comes next?

My use of Tumblr fell away gradually, and I stopped tweeting when Elon Musk bought Twitter. I didn’t jump to another platform immediately, because I wanted to pause and reflect on what I wanted from social media. Currently, my social media usage is limited to linking to blog posts.

Looking back over my old posts has helped with those reflections. I’d like to think I’ve grown up a bit in the interim, and that I’d use it better if I made it a bigger part of my life again. A lot of good things started as conversations on social media, and I often wonder if I’m missing out. But I don’t miss the time sunk in pointless arguments, the performative anger, or the abuse from strangers.

I still don’t know what my future with social media will look like, but this project has me wondering. Until I decide, my scrapbook lets me see the best of what’s already been – the friendships, the joy, and the moments that mattered.