Rescuing My Stuff From Social Media

/Blog #Webdev

At the end of 2024, I rebuilt my website. Visual Lizard maintains an in-house content management system called Catalyst, and its worth my time to eat my own dogfood. My site got a minor face-lift and got updated to the latest CMS version.

Porting over the content highlighted all the places I relied on third-party services, and where that reliance bit me in the butt.

Somewhere around 2018, photo site Flickr was acquired and the new owners kiboshed that site's one-terabyte free storage plan. I moved most of my images to Google Photos while trimming down the number and types of pictures I was actually interested in keeping.

The unintended side-effect was losing blog content. When posting articles, I uploaded the associated images to Flickr, hot-linking them from there. It certainly saved me bandwidth and storage space! But when I culled those files from Flickr, those articles ended up with broken-image links everywhere.

I didn't realize the damage until I did the data transfer some six years later. Any chance of recovering those files were long past. In some cases, I could recover copies... from Google Photos, from mirrored posts to other platforms, from web archives, or possibly the original source like sketchbooks still in a drawer somewhere. In other cases, they were plain gone.

Another problem point was Twitter. With the ownership change and the resulting cultural shift on that platform, I closed my account. Write-ups, quotes, conversations, image shares, or any other content there disappeared with that account closure. Anything there I wanted to keep, I needed to rescue.

I found this pattern repeated.

I shared some videogame screenshots and commentary to Mastodon. Of interest to nearly nobody, this is true. Still, all that content vanishes if the server administrator every closes shop.

I shared artwork up onto Instagram and Reddit. Those platforms' priorities are their own, and those priorities could conflict with my priorities at any time.

Moving forward, I'd do my best to avoid these same mistakes.

There's a not-insignificant time investment in manually copying images and content from other platforms. Especially as those platforms very much don't want you pulling content off of them. But having that content under my own umbrella means I can be less beholden to what third-parties want and don't want.

And none of this means I cannot continue to share with social media. Its just, social media and its ilk should not be the canonical source of my content. If anything happens - or needs to happen - I want to be able to point interested parties back to my own website.

Want to explore more of my site? I got you covered! All my posts are grouped by category to help you find what you're most interested in!