Sixteen years, and they took the account

I created @music on Twitter in 2007 and ran it until 2023. Then the platform took the handle back. There was no path to contest it that I am putting on the record here.

That is the story I can stand behind. I am going to leave the rest off, because the rest would be invention.

I do not have a follower count I am willing to publish. I am not going to describe what the account became, or walk through how the loss happened, because I would be reconstructing a scene for the essay. Sixteen years, then the handle was gone, and there was no appeal I am documenting. If that is thinner than a good story, it is the version that is true.

The lesson people take from a story like this is usually the wrong one.

It is not "quit social media." I am not quitting. Distribution still happens on platforms I do not own. Pretending otherwise is a different kind of vanity.

It is not "platforms are evil." A platform is a company with a terms of service and an enforcement model. Sometimes the model is a person. Increasingly it is not. Calling that evil is a way of not looking at the ownership structure.

The asset was real. Sixteen years of showing up under one name is not nothing. The ownership was not. I had custody of a handle. Custody is not title. I learned that the expensive way, and I am not going to dress the expense up as a thriller.

What I took from it, and what this site is built around, is a boring distinction: canonical copy versus distribution.

The writing I want to keep lives in files I control. This site is Markdown in a git repository. There is no database, no CMS, and no admin interface. If the host goes away, the files are still the site. Mentions of topics become links because the site can read all of itself, not because a vendor graph said so.

Notes on this site can hold imported tweets. The architecture is ready to be the canonical copy of a feed. That is the point of importing them back into files. The tweet can live on a platform as distribution. The file is the copy I can still open if the platform changes its mind again.

If every platform I use disappeared tomorrow, the writing would still be here, and it would still be mine. That sentence is why the site looks the way it does. It is not an aesthetic. It is a reaction to a handle I ran for sixteen years and do not have.

"No appeal" is the product decision I want to keep in view. I am not claiming I have a paper trail of a rejected ticket. I am saying the system is built so that recovery is not a right you can exercise. An automated decision can close an account. The path back, if there is one, is not a process you can count on, and it is not a process I am going to fictionalize. Treat that as a design property, not an accident that happened to me in particular.

The version of this that is about to bite solo operators is not a music handle.

It is a business running on one vendor account. The store, the ads, the email list, the cloud project, the domain registrar login that is the only way back into the domain. One identity. Revocable by an automated fraud model with no human in the path. You do not need a villain. You need a false positive and a queue that does not contain a person who can hear you.

I am not going to invent a second loss to make that concrete. I have one receipt. It is enough to see the shape. Account survival is infrastructure. It is not paranoia, and it is not a personality. If the thing that pays you can be turned off by a model you cannot speak to, you do not own a business. You have a lease with a silent landlord.

I still use platforms. I still publish in places I do not control. I am not performing a retreat. I am keeping the canonical copy where a terms-of-service change cannot take the files, and I am treating everything else as a pipe.

I am still working out how much of my current work sits on a handle I do not own. The site is the part I have already moved. The scheduled estate, the vendor logins, the places a solo operator is one recovery-email away from a closed door: those are not finished. I know what sixteen years of custody without title looks like. I am still figuring out how many of those leases I am holding right now, and which ones I would still be able to open if the model decided I was the fraud.

Related: Owning your platform