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Proposal for Twitter to move inactive accounts to cold-archive instead of purge

As Twitter is ruminating about deleting inactive accounts again, I want to share here about a proposal which was part of a university thesis, with some improvements based on current context.

The inactive accounts, in this proposal, will be moved to a cold archive after a prolonged period of inactivity, ranging from 6 months to two years. The cold archive consist of:

1. A separate subdomain from main Twitter. Example archive.twitter.com or limbo.twitter.com

2. While accounts retain their original usernames as part of archive usernames, their mainspace usernames will be freed up. Discord-style number discriminators may be used so to prevent archive username exhaustion, although keeping their names intact during the process is ideal.

3. If an archived account is accessed, there will be a prompt to ask whether to restore to mainspace or leave it as it is. In the case of the former, their mainspace usernames are usually restored, but if someone else has taken up the slot then they have to choose a new username.

4. Past search histories that are related to the account is deleted upon archiving.

5. While as in normal mode, tweets and users can be browsed through its internal search engine, a robots.txt will forbid Google and other bots to index any and all contents of the archive subdomain. Exceptions only apply to Internet Archive's bots.

( 5 comments | on HN )
Re:Proposal for Twitter to move inactive accounts to cold-ar... by uberman on Monday May 08, 2023 @05:27PM (#35867268)
Frame challenge : Why would accounts ever need to be archived?
Re:Proposal for Twitter to move inactive accounts to cold-ar... by BulgarianIdiot on Monday May 08, 2023 @06:05PM (#35867579)
You, who wrote this here, spend more time and resources coming up with it, than Elon has time and resources to allocate for implementing it, after firing 90% of the company. It won't happen. He wants to free up space, and sell the names, with minimum effort involved. That's all.

Twitter is being dismantled and sold for parts.

Re:Proposal for Twitter to move inactive accounts to cold-ar... by uberman on Monday May 08, 2023 @07:37PM (#35868372)
I dont disagree that Twitter is being dismantled, but is anything actually getting parted out? Other than maybe blue checks?
Re:Proposal for Twitter to move inactive accounts to cold-ar... by qbrass on Monday May 08, 2023 @09:40PM (#35869253)
The office furniture? There's not much you can chunk off of Twitter that's saleable besides user data and the core business.
Re:Proposal for Twitter to move inactive accounts to cold-ar... by BulgarianIdiot on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @10:34AM (#35874933)
And the funny thing is they indeed sell anything from the offices that's not bolted on couple of months ago.