I have a Telegram channel called @ferilog. Had one. I'm still figuring out which tense is right.
I started it on a Tuesday in August 2022. No big announcement, no plan. I just wanted a place to put things I found interesting: links, thoughts, notes, random observations. Over time it became something closer to a public journal. It started with 10 or 20 members, all close friends. By the time I deleted it, it had grown to around 100. The size was never the point. The point was the habit. Every time I found something worth saving, opening Telegram and dropping it into @ferilog was one of the first things I'd do.
1,418 days of that.
Last night I was showing someone the channel. I'd just updated the profile picture and was mid-sentence explaining what it meant to me, genuinely enthusiastic. Then I noticed the group chat attached to it had been quiet for a while. Nobody was writing in there anyway. I thought: why keep a dead group chat? I'll just delete it.
I went into settings. Clicked Delete.
The channel was gone.
On mobile, Telegram shows a 5-second countdown before you can confirm something like this. A small grace period for the inevitable "wait, what." On the laptop client, that timer didn't appear. I confirmed. The channel disappeared. All of it: every post, every link, every note I'd saved there over four years.
I sat there for a few seconds not saying anything.
The thing that made it worse: I've spent years rolling my eyes at people who click through scary confirmation dialogs without reading them. "Are you sure you want to delete this?" Yes, click. "This action cannot be undone." Yes, click. I had opinions about this. I thought it was careless.
I'd clicked Delete on the wrong thing. Same word in the menu, different action. The timer that would have saved me didn't appear.
1,418 days.
There's a strange timing to all of this. In my first post on this blog, I wrote about exactly this problem with Telegram: the content floats, it's hard to find, and the whole thing could disappear if the platform changes its mind. I didn't expect to prove my own point quite so quickly, and quite so personally.
It also made me feel even more strongly about Posthaven's pledge. I want this blog to stay online. Not just while I'm around to pay for it, but as a record of a life in software, here even after I'm not. Yesterday reminded me why that matters.
The channel is back: t.me/ferilog. Better formatted content, a backup strategy, and considerably more respect for confirmation dialogs.
The memories are gone. The habit isn't.
To new memories. 🍻