After having received a notification from Twitter in October that he’d been shadow-banned, Manuel Matuzovic, a web developer from Vienna, Austria, seems to now have be permanently banned. In a lengthy post he describes what this all includes. In short, he can still access his own posts but images are gone, direct messages are gone, as are bookmarks. Also: Login on third-party sites using Twitter doesn’t work anymore.
This sounds a bit weird, that some content is still available while other types are not. I’d be curious to find out what data Twitter would now send him if he made a data request (according to the GDPR) 🤪
If there’s something I’ve learned from this whole thing, it’s that I must be more careful with how and where I share my content.
This is an important lesson to learn online and one that I had to re-learn again and again after Pownce, app.net, and other networks that I enjoyed in the past went down. Having a place of your own for all the content that you actually care about (or at least have control over the relevant links) is just one step, though. Another is to find a way to archive important conversations or at least have them on platforms that are decentralised so that not a single actor can prevent you from accessing them. Something to prevent someone from severing the connections with others you’ve built over the years 🙂
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂