I was reminded that I have not been backing up contents that I’ve created that sit in walled gardens like LinkedIn. Once upon a time, I did also post into that site called Facebook, but since about 2015 or so, I stopped entirely. I pulled out whatever contents I had created and turned my account dormant and private.

I am glad that I did that.

Yes, I have lost connections with family and friends, but that is a price I am willing to pay. Family and friends have been able to reconnect via the public Internet instead of that walled garden which, from all accounts has been a cesspool of lies, conspiracy theories and scam artists – my perception as well.

The other one that I had been fairly active was Twitter, which I’ve exited because of how that platform as well has been enshittified.

As noted above, I have requested and received all of the contents I had on Facebook and also did the same for Twitter. I have also done the same with LinkedIN.

All of those materials are on my home servers (and backed up on no-cost cloud infra).

Here’s how you’d extract from LinkedIN:

You will get an initial email with a zipped file and then the full archive. You will still need to go to through the received zipped file and run the links to download the actual contents. LinkedIN does not send you the entire archive, but links to them that you’ll need to then pull down.

What I will be doing with the contents I’ve received is to turn the text info markdown and keep the media (images, videos etc) as themselves with a link from the relevant markdown files.

I am planning on adding all of those to this blog as well and am exploring scripts to make that happen. Suggestions are welcome.

I recognize that wordpress.com (where this blog is hosted) would itself be enshittified, but since it is not a walled garden, it is less of an annoyance. Naturally, I’ve automated back up all of the contents here as well.