Owning My Data

My online presence went back 10+ years. Last year alone I made 146 new posts on Facebook, 65 tweets on Twitter, 76 photos on Instagram, 1091 check-ins on Swarm, and countless interactions such as “likes” and “favorites”. I knew the exact numbers because I’ve been making a conscious effort to preserve this data, if only to look back and reconstruct my activities in any given day¹. Backstalking is fun.

There are online services like Timehop that gives users an easy way to explore their historical digital content, but I prefer to keep my data offline in a portable format like JSON or XML. I’m relying on an app called Momento, which has been under active development since 2011. It connects to more than a dozen social networks, periodically downloads my content there, and presents them in a nice layout². Data can be exported at any time via iTunes File Sharing, so there’s no lock-in.

I keep the following feeds in Momento:

• Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Swarm, Medium, Goodreads, Uber: All supported out of the box.
• Pinboard, Vimeo, Instapaper (Archived and Starred), GitLab, NewsBlur (Saved Stories): Needs manual setup using RSS feed.

Momento’s ability to download RSS feed works extremely well with Pinboard’s filter support: Bookmarks can be filtered by multiple tags, with a secret RSS feed URL to subscribe to. I use IFTTT recipes to automatically send URLs from sources without RSS support to Pinboard, which in turn are pulled into Momento for safe keeping:

• Liked tweets on Twitter
• Liked videos on YouTube

One significant downside of Momento is its iPhone-only nature. In the past, I used Digi.me on the Mac to download my digital content but stopped doing so as they pivoted and changed their business model for the second time: from paid upfront to freemium with subscription, then to free with some asterisks. I have yet to find a replacement for that.

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