Talking with Violet tonight I realized how scary things are sometimes. I’ve
spent the greater portion of my life talking to people online. I’ve been on IRC
since I was 10, younger than anyone really should be, and I’ve been using
Discord for a few years now. IRC is a plain text protocol, you keep the logs and
it isn’t really the responsibility of anyone else. Had I been better with
keeping archives and placing value on things like that, I might have logs from
long ago. There are friends who I only knew on IRC, and this being prior to the
lack of anonymity we’ve accepted in our social networks, I actually don’t know
any of their names. There’s a small selection of people who I’ve kept up in
other ways, because as luck would have it I’d run into them again somewhere and
know for sure it was them. What about those who I do not remember anymore, who
no longer seem to coalesce where I did? The memory of them has become blurry and
obscured as I’ve gotten older and realized how many years depression, social
ostracization, and gender dysphoria took from me. I was cleaning out my Dropbox
account a few months ago when I found three screenshots of my desktop from
around 2011. They are the earliest pictures I have of things I did on the
computer that I remember taking. In one screenshot, there was an XChat window
with me and a friend talking in a channel we founded together, to work on fun
stuff for the Nintendo DSi’s web browser. What happened to the screenshots, and
why am I not posting them here? Because past me deleted them. I thought I should
move on, and I didn’t have the IRC logs of the conversations I had with that
person anymore. That was a (looking back now, ironic) choice I made for myself.
I met Violet on Tumblr, I knew her there for years and years, and we started
talking more after we both were on a Discord server dedicated to a favorite
music artist. Had I not chosen to talk more to her, I would not have started
hormone therapy and escaped the clutches of depression, I would not have
traveled out of the country for the first time in my life, and I would be a much
lonelier person. What does this have to do with anything else mentioned here? At
the time I’m writing this, we have sent 330,097 direct messages back and forth
since January 13th, 2017. The first things said were "Hi" (from her), and then
"🐱 cat" (from me). She had a cat as her avatar at the time. (she told me this
while reading this post, because I didn’t remember this anymore, and only her
current avatar on Discord shows for all of her messages, which is no longer a
cat) We talk just about every single day and if I had the message data myself
I’d be interested in finding the days in which we did not talk. The me that sent
that reply is an unrecognizably different person than who I am now; stays in her
room, lives with her parents, has a tenuous relationship with anyone at school
and anyone her age. I now live two and a half hours from my parents in the
mountains of North Carolina with three other roommates, one of which is my other
girlfriend, Cassie; did I mention I’m polyamorous now? I talk to my mom almost
every day even if I have nothing to say, people at work seem to think I’m a
normal human being. I have changed. I’m rambling again. When me and Violet are
together, our chat goes quiet. If one were to look at our chat history they
might think something had happened for a month of my life, to cause me to not
really say much at all to her and vice versa. It scares me for a very irrational
reason: a stunning amount of my life has changed purely through a single chat
window I’ve had on my computer for multiple years. I have no logs of it; I am
purely going on the grace of Discord, that they will not suddenly disappear one
day and take all of our words with it. Is Discord profitable? It won’t stay
profitable. No proprietary chat solution has ever stayed profitable. It too,
will fall. When GDPR came into effect, Discord suddenly started allowing people
to download their data in a huge, unmaintainable and irritating archive of data,
that, if memory serves (it doesn’t!), only even contains your side of all
conversations. This makes sense from a legal standpoint, but they are therefore
the most useless conversation logs ever because of it. There are other archiving
mechanisms: pullcord, and Discord
History Tracker. These solutions work to actually
create logs of your chats, rather than just giving you all your data and
forgetting a conversation isn’t one-sided. Discord History Tracker actually is
just a script on top of the Discord client itself that uses the client’s own
mechanisms to download all the messages it can. It is a cumbersome and slow
method, and it will take a very long time to download everything, but it is the
safest and least easily bannable method of archiving your chats. It does not
archive anything that is not a text message. Message attachments are only left
in as URLs to their location on cdn.discordapp.com. pullcord downloads
everything: custom emojis, all shared files/images, every server and channel
and direct message your account can access, it will download. It also comes with
a disclaimer on the readme that your account could get banned, because it’s
using an unofficial Discord client to interface with a standard Discord user
account, rather than a bot account. Discord’s
ToS does not allow this. They instead include
gems such as: > You agree not to (and not to attempt to) (i) use the Service for
any > use or purpose other than as expressly permitted by these Terms; (ii) >
copy, adapt, modify, prepare derivative works based upon, distribute, > license,
sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, > stream,
broadcast, attempt to discover any source code, reverse > engineer, decompile,
disassemble, or otherwise exploit the Service or > any portion of the Service,
except as expressly permitted in these > Terms; or (iii) use data mining,
robots, spiders, or similar data > gathering and extraction tools on the
Service. No licenses or rights > are granted to you by implication or otherwise
under any intellectual > property rights owned or controlled by the Company or
its licensors, > except for the permissions and rights expressly granted in
these > Terms. Emphasis mine. So when we are together, and our chat goes quiet,
I feel a pit in stomach in an indescribable way sometimes. I’m with her, I’m
happy, but the entire method and medium with which we talk has lost that
relatively concrete property. The memories I have of our conversations in person
will fade, and whenever I finally start to live with her, the writing of this
post will be such a distant memory that I will likely not remember what exactly
the conversation that prompted this was. The years I have forgotten have left a
hole that I can not entirely account for in my own history, and I can only hope
that as time goes on and I have other to fill in the gaps, it might gain more
clarity as years go by; but it could just as easily continue to disappear, and I
sure have let it do so. I can not index and search through the words I’ve said
in the bed before falling asleep. Where am I going with this? It is the
responsibility of any communication protocol to not do this shit. Be gentle with
your users; be gentle with their conversations and value what they say. I could
almost excuse Discord’s "no data gathering and extraction tools" rule, if they
provided a local logging mechanism of some sort, but they do not. I am,
additionally, learning that perhaps this is simply a thing I will need to learn
to become easy with. Normally I am a very easy going person, willing to throw
away the concrete and the permanent when it seems bothersome and constricting.
Do I need to let go of this concreteness, and accept that all conversations are
ephemeral by their very nature? Maybe I do, and perhaps I should also spend
less time on the computer. With IRC, at least you knew what you were getting
into. It is ephemeral in a way Snapchat can only dream to be, because it only
serves to repeat what was sent to it to anyone who happens to be listening. So
if you wanted to have history, you’d keep logs, and if you really valued it
you’d keep them for as long as you could. If you didn’t have them, maybe you
could ask someone else in the channel? Or perhaps your IRC bouncer has been
keeping logs for years while you’ve been barely checking a channel. This is
something that every chat service in existence today seems to throw to the
wayside. Logs become the responsibility of the service provider, and the service
provider isn’t very sentimental about the first time you told her you loved her,
or the long nights you stayed up talking, or the fact that you called your
chat’s pinned messages "the fridge" because you thought it was cute. The
purpose is to provide that service of history, it is not to create ownership or
identification with that history. Any chat service that provides archive
downloading might only provide the messages you sent, which is a thing that
makes legal sense, but not human sense. The thought of running pullcord on a
cronjob and having a consistent and up-to-date copy of all the conversations
I’ve had on Discord sounds so nice. I’m afraid though that the amount of data I
would download would get me noticed and banned though, and being banned is
scary. I’d have the archives, but they’re only facsimiles, they’re not the chat
window where I had all these memories in. I’m not sure how to finish this but if
anything, consider this a plea to all chat services to at the very least provide
local logging, or at least allow me to use a utility like pullcord without
issue. I have lost enough. I am confronted with the inevitability that my
memories of the good times I have had will fade away in a more secret and quiet
way than the bad memories have, and I want to at least put up a fight.